5 interesting facts about snow and 3 restaurants to warm up after a winter trip

If you have ever taken a closer look at snowflakes, you will notice that they don’t all look the same: experts say there are at least 35 different shapes of snowflake. Some resemble a star, others are shaped like the leaves of a fern, but there are also hollow, prismatic and needle-like pieces of snow. We may wonder; what is behind this. The shape is mainly influenced by the temperature: minus 15 degrees is said to be the ideal temperature for perfectly symmetrical snowflakes.

Snowflakes, whatever their shape, always have six sides, because the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in the ice crystal are always connected in a hexagonal structure.

If, on an icy, winter day, you happen to be in the Parád area and you get hungry while examining the snowflakes, you might want to try the cuisine of Parád Kisvendéglő! The Mátra Mountains and their surroundings are also a wonderful destination; yes, even in winter. If we find that we have done enough traipsing in the snow and are in the Mátrafüred area, the 4 Évszak Palóc Bistorant is also worth a taste test!

There’s an old joke about not eating the yellow snow... But few people know that snow is not necessarily white. Most of the time, of course, we see it as such, because the frozen – and originally transparent – water particles appear white from the reflection of the sun’s light. However, the environmental effects are not always the same, so you may see snow as coloured instead of white. Pale pink snow is common near glaciers, where algae rich in red pigment live. In fact, if you dig deep down into the snow and peer into the cavity, you can see the frozen water crystals as having a bluish tint, as the light has to travel a relatively longer distance to reach the snow and is reflected back from it differently.

In 1887, a Montana man claimed that snowflakes nearly 40 centimetres in diameter were falling from the sky. Experts are a little dubious of the gentleman’s words, as they have never seen a snow crystal of this size – but they have seen one as big as 15 centimetres.

In Lapland, there are up to 300 different words that refer to different states of snow and ice. The Eskimos are at least a tiny nose ahead of them because of their polysynthetic use of language, which means they can shorten even a very long sentence into a single word. Thanks to this, they have a virtually infinite number of ways to express their snowy ideas, for example, they can say in one word, “I didn’t notice the frozen puddle under the snow this morning, it broke under me and my trousers got wet.”

And speaking of Eskimos, let’s also talk about igloos: on the northern shore of Lake Balaton, on the terrace of the Tölgyes Mansion, for example, a nice igloo has been built, where you can sit down and warm up in winter, of course, with a little gastronomic adventure.