As all over the US (and the media has reported elsewhere) we’ve had a terrible cold blitz this week. Or it’s been cold for DC. For whatever reason, I still have Ulaanbaatar on my phone’s weather app and I saw that it was -38 C there the other day). But probably because of the humidity, negative temperatures here have felt very cold. And when on Monday, it went from 8 C in the morning to -8 later in the day, and I hadn’t brought warm shoes or my hat, I was tempted to skip my ballet class after work. But then I remembered how someone told me that for a few years after independence in the 1990s, the Chisinau Opera and Ballet barely had money to heat its facilities, and that at one point, the ballet dancers performed with 2 C on the stage. After that, I dragged myself up to my Joy of Motion class in Bethesda – I really had no excuse not to!