Gabrielle Dunn – Case Western Reserve University, Ohio

Within the first 2 days of arriving to Case, all the new transfer/exchange students had a day long orientation tour. During this, we had those standard health and safety talks, including being told about ‘safe ride’ which is a school-run lift service that you can contact if ever you feel unsafe around campus after dark (which I thought was pretty handy).

We also stopped off at Mitchell’s, an organic ice cream shop which has every flavour of ice cream you could ever imagine (menu snippet attached

But what got me throughout this tour, is how cold it was outside! The plus side was that my ice-cream didn’t as much as falter under the cold conditions, whilst on the other hand my fingers were doing their best attempt at camouflaging into the ‘Blue Cosmo’ ice cream I was eating. N.B. bring gloves to Cleveland!

See what was funny was that throughout the tour, the orientation leaders kept on remarking how they couldn’t believe the mildness of the winter season. -2 degrees didn’t seem to faze them at all! Meanwhile I, as well as a transfer student from sunny California were like “woah, we need to invest in some snow boots asap”. And I’m so glad we did. Over the next few days we got a taste of what our tour guides meant by the once ‘mild’ conditions; temperatures dropped to -14 degrees and snow came in hard and fast. Perfect conditions for Frosty and his snowman friends, but I really could not get over how I could literally be standing in a freezer and feel no change in temperature.

Yet it’s not so bad! Recently temperatures have risen and the sun has come out again; it has been a solid 3 degrees over the last few days! And believe me, I’ll take that over those super cold temps any day (sorry Frosty). Locals are still saying that this winter is one of the mildest ones they’ve had in a whileee; and it’s so hard to comprehend what they mean until you’re here. So yep, first words of advice: check the weather of where you’re going. R.E. Case Western specifically, bring a hat, scarf, gloves, and never underestimate the power of the snowboot.