On thin Ice?

Most of Europe was crippled by the unusual cold spell the last few weeks. However, in Uppsala life was not disrupted as people went back to work after the Christmas holiday. We experienced an all time record low (as South Africans) when the temperatures dropped to -21.8°C. We went for a walk and the photo was taken at sub -20° at 01:15 in the afternoon (the camera stopped working for a while after this picture):

One of the things that we were looking forward to were to skate on the frozen lake (spanning about 60km from Uppsala to Stockholm). As South Africans we were slightly apprehensive to test the ice ourselves but we heard that a track was scraped during this week and safe to skate on. Still worried, both about our skill level on ice skates and falling though the ice (and drowning and freezing), we went to lake Mälaren. We saw many people on the scraped track, including mothers skating while pushing their babies in prams, and we deemed it safe to go for it.

Here are a few pictures of us on the track about 2km from the shore:

Although it was a beautiful day with ample sun and a relatively warm -10°C, anything sticking out still tend to freeze:
This is something we will definitely do often.

R&C