Freezing Arctic Weather and Pick Pockets

This is the absolute coldest time of year- right in the heart of winter- and the temperature creeps down into the -20’s during the daytime. In this kind of weather you can feel the boogers in your nose freeze when you breathe. When I walk to the metro after taking my morning shower, my hair freezes. Coming out of the metro I am engulfed in a huge cloud of steam as the heat coming through the doors instantly vaporizes the frigid air.
Enormous icicles dangle from porches and from the tops of buildings. Some days the sidewalks are blocked off to let workers clean the roofs and knock the ice down. I hear from the Ukrainians that people are killed every year by falling icicles. The other day I picked an enormous one from a low hanging building. It weighed about 20 pounds and was more than three feet long. I can imagine what it would do to a person if it fell on them from three stories up.
Although it is as cold as the center of hell (think Dante’s hell) the weather has been beautiful. Every day has been sunny and bright without a cloud in the sky. It’s too bad it’s too cold to go on walks.
It is so cold here that my classes were cancelled for the week. Only my economics classes though, not the language ones. I guess Ukrainians can’t handle the cold the way Russians can.

Today the French traveller fella’ and I were planning to go cross country skiing, even if it meant battling the frost. I stepped into the crowded metro and was bumped into by some guy. I felt something move in my back pocket, and when I reached back and patted myself my wallet was gone. The metro was moving at this point and there were three guys standing close to me who were all likely suspects. I grabbed the guy closest to me and started feeling his pockets, but there was nothing. He even opened his bag to show me that it was empty. There was another greasy Euro-trash acne-scarred guy who I confronted, and then some other guy in a black hat who was acting suspiciously unaware.
Basically, the wallet was gone. The first guy was probably the guy who grabbed it out of my pocket. He then probably passed it off to one of those other guys, but how was I going the prove that? I decided to try to follow the guy in the black hat and so John Christoff and I got off the train. The guy in the black hat disappeared in the crowd and the other guys on the train were long gone.
They didn’t get that much: only 200 griven ($25), a few 1$ bills (useless here) and an assortment of small bills from Ghana and Lithuania. But, now my driver’s license, library card, gym card, student i.d., and my 50% off coupon for the Ukrainian cafeteria are all gone. It’s frustrating and inconvenient, but everything is replaceable.
After being robbed at machete point in Ghana, I can’t complain too much.