All Hail the Hail

It's so rare we get really good, dramatic weather in Berlin (I love dramatic weather! thunderstorms!) so I get excited when we do. Here's a brief story of today's weather in pictures.

Today, I worked part of the day in the sun on the balcony. In the evening, I went and sat outside for a bit again. It looked like this:

Pretty suddenly, the wind started to whip up and the clouds rolled in. My laptop and I kept inching further into the apartment from the balcony by degrees as the sky started to look like this – possibly you can even see the streaks of rain coming down:

Then with no warming at all, hail! Really violent, big balls of ice, whipping up and down and all over the place. The white streaks in this picture are all hail:

 

 

 It hailed so emphatically, the ice scattered all the way across the kitchen floor:

  

 Here's a piece of hail with some large-ish cherry tomatoes for comparison. It had already been sitting there melting for a while by the time I thought to photograph it, so it was definitely bigger when it first came down:

And here's the sky afterward, gone back to being hail-less but pleasantly dramatic: