I'm from a country where it doesn't snow in the cities.
If you're lucky it might snow in some alpine areas a couple of hours out of the city (see Victorian and New South Wales snowfields), but mostly you only see snow if you go hunting for it, and rarely do you ever see it actually falling. If need be, the holiday resorts manufacture their own snow so they can maintain a ski season in years when the snowfall isn't up to par.
I think the first time I saw snow was in about sixth grade when my parents took us away for a day to the Victorian snowfields, and my brothers and I had our first experience of throwing snowballs at each other, making a snowman, and just generally mucking about in the snow. I can't recall ever attempting to ski, but my memory may be fuzzy on this.
Apart from that, and being sleeted upon in November 2006 whilst tramping around the Tongariro Crossing area of New Zealand (I wasn't brave enough to climb the scree with my friends, Hugh and Jamie, who subsequently got properly snowed upon), my heaviest actual snowfall experienced previously was pretty piddling: a flurry in Birmingham city centre a couple of weeks after arriving in the UK in 1999, and a similarly brief 'white Christmas' in Newcastle a few weeks later.
Even in the two and a half years I lived here previously, most of the snow I experienced was already on the ground. This included when I had to work between the Christmas and New Year holidays one year, and I walked out of my front door in Reading and stopped on the doorstep, utterly perplexed at what confronted me. It took a good couple of beats before my sleep-deprived brain registered "It snowed!" Having snowed overnight whilst we slept, I had still not been snowed upon, good and proper; and since I had to work, I left my housemate and my then-boyfriend to run around in said snow in their boxer shorts throwing snowballs at each other, whilst I attempted to venture into town without falling on my arse.
So you can imagine I was pretty excited by actual snow, actually falling, at the start of February right outside my house. There were a few preliminary flurries over the weeks leading up to it, but I'd managed to blink and miss every single one. And given the windows to my bedroom are quite high up, and mostly obscured from view by the sloping ceiling when I'm sitting at my desk, it was only because I was talking with my housemates at the time and my landlady mentioned it, that I even noticed.
Suffice to say, despite the cold, I grabbed my camera and wandered out to try to catch some photos. Some at the beginning of the snowfall from the footpath outside my house; the rest from the warmth and dry of my bedroom, the landing, the kitchen and lounge.
I even woke at random points through the night to check if it was still snowing (e.g. 4:30am, and again at 8:30am), and shot off some more photos.
My landlady and housemates were not so excited by the prospect of snow, with concerns about driving and potential flight delays. And though I worried about the impact it would have on Kyle's arrival (it caused slight additional delay); and knew the novelty would pass once I had to venture out, once the snow had turned to sludge, and when the pure white snowfall was discoloured by so many neighbourhood dogs' urine, I think my inner tourist was showing.
