By Andrew Shepherd

Canadians in New York wake up to familiar snowy sight

Jan 27, 2015 | 3:13 PM

Canadians living in New York woke up Tuesday morning to a scene they’re all too familiar with.

The city came to a halt Monday night in preparation for what was expected to be the worst winter blizzard the area has ever seen. Thousands of flights were cancelled, roads were closed and the subway was shut down.

Instead, it was spared from the brunt of the storm with the hardest hit areas being in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Amber Gamma is from Calgary and goes to school in Yonkers, N.Y. When she and her two Canadian roommates, Michelle Caudle and Kara Anstett, looked outside in the morning and saw the five to six inches of snow, it paled in comparison to the hype.

“We were kind of laughing over the fact that it was just a typical Calgary snow storm,” said Gamma.

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“Everyone was getting ready to get down in bunkers in their houses. All the grocery stores were crazy,” said Caudle, who is from Ontario.

“It kind of seemed like the world was ending,” said Anstett, who is from Edmonton.

They are blaming the American media for making it a bigger deal than it turned out to be. Gamma said it was just as over-hyped as Ebola was when there was just the one case in New York.

While they believe it wasn’t very necessary to shut down the whole area in preparation to the storm, they do say it was probably a good idea to keep drivers off the roads.

“If you were to go outside and go on the street and ask them if they had snow tires, they would look at you with a blank face,” said Gamma.

They have learned New Yorkers prepare for a winter storm much differently than people in the prairies. While the Canadians get a head start shoveling the driveway, neighbours raided the grocery stores.

The roommates admit that after a while, they realized maybe this could be a worse storm than they thought. However, they only decided to grab some extra water and hot chocolate in the rare case something extremely bad would happen.

Fortunately that wasn’t the result and now the Canadians are enjoying their day off in an environment which feels a little closer to home.

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