Today, there was a hailstorm in Oslo. No big deal, right? Certainly nothing to warrant an entry in /edgewise.

You'd think.

This particular hailstorm was nothing like the hailstorms we usually get here in Norway. In my experience, Norwegian hailstorms are brief and embarrassingly trivial. Our hail is usually the size of salt grains, barely distinguishable from cold rain. Today, though...today we got a taste of divine wrath.

I was sitting in a café with a friend when suddenly, without warning, icy balls the size of marbles started hammering down from the sky. Thousands of them, bouncing like basketballs on the asphalt, assaulting t-shirted pedestrians, bombarding cars, shattering into fragments as they fell like mortar to the Earth. It was amazing. It was cool. Especially since we were sitting inside with a ringside view of what appeared to be the end of the world.

It only took five minutes for the show to wrap up, for the ice to turn into rain, and for life to return to normal.

Now, I know that in other parts of the world, this is no big deal; that in America, you get hail the size of buildings that can crush a man and the car he's in. To me, though, this was a show worth watching, and a reminder that nature can still surprise me...and scare me a bit.  ¶ 20:52