My 5 favorite European winter places: a photo exposé

The cold and rainy weather up here in Northern California, warm wintery concoctions of mulled wine and eggnog that I've been drinking too much of, and the in-your-face holiday merriment of Americans during the entire month of December have got me reminiscing HARD about my last three European winters.

After a long summer backpacking around Europe in 2013, I decided to stay, move to Prague and take courses to become an English teacher. In Copenhagen in October, I realized I was going to need to invest in something other than the one emergency windbreaker that added .4 lbs to the 25 I carried on my back for 3 months. I found a thrift store and bought a men's wool sweater that was made in the USA, ironically, and an old Italian leather bomber jacket that I've since refused to let go of and which hangs in my California closet. Well, Copenhagen is one of the most expensive cities ever so with no money left for winter shoes, I had a hell of a time bearing the below zero temperatures in Prague in my Converse. I should be so lucky to still have all my toes.

In the winter of 2014, with a week off of work, a friend and I searched the web for the cheapest round trip flights out of Istanbul, which was Zagreb. Croatia is one of the most sought after vacation destinations... in the summer. So we flew there in January for $50. It was amazing - we had the city to ourselves and drank all the mulled wine. Probably the best thing about Zagreb in the winter though is its proximity to Slovenia by train. Capital city Ljubliana is so very underrated, with its fine dining restaurants, pubs with a million beers on tap, and metal concerts that begin at 2am, and is still one of my top three favorite cities in the world. When we arrived in Ljubliana and found the town's best pub - and were coerced into playing rounds of pub quiz - we learned that everyone was anticipating the biggest storm of the season in the next day or two. We left the bar that night with two kind souls willing to drive us back to Zagreb should the trains stop and we come close to missing our flight home. One was the husband of an American woman who'd left the states, fell in love with little Ljubliana and never returned.

In 2015, I lived in Istanbul, the city of 20 million that still completely shuts down in the snow. Outside my Tarlabasi home the main street was usually in a constant state of chaos. But when snow covered the ground - and after the first few cars failed to climb the incline of our road and crashed into parked cars which set off a series of car alarms, yelling, and probably fist fights or men running at one another with metal poles - it was completely quiet. We loved the snow because it meant our brick roof wouldn't leak water as quickly as it did when it rained, so maybe we could manage to fit five or so people in the living room for a movie. We would stay up as late as it took for the mayor of education to declare whether school was closed the next day or not. And if a snow day was declared a celebration would commence but first we'd argue about who was going to go out for wine and a 10 gallon jug of water for drinking and maybe showering should the water get shut off.

So even though I'm as comfortable as I could be here in California, where 35 degrees fahrenheit is warm in comparison but just in case there are two wood stoves in our home, all of the clean drinking water I could ask for to heat up a tea, the fuzzy Polish slippers I bought for $5 before they became trendy and $80, and all of the other things that allow me comfort that I have to be thankful for, I am still really missing my European winters.

So, I went through the endless Dropbox and iCloud folders to bring you...