Fun With Winter

By Kevin Robinson in News on Feb 8, 2007 5:30PM

Did you know if you blow bubbles outside, they freeze? Neither did we! If there is one thing that you can say about us here at Chicagoist, it's that we're kids at heart. After a friend of ours told us all about this, we just had to try this fun winter trick, what with the crazy cold temperatures and all. So we ran to our nearest dollar store and got us a bottle of bubbles. They're in aisle 6, not with the kids toys. Weirdly enough.

We figured that this would work best if we chilled the bubbles first, and carrying them around in our coat pocket didn't seem to do the trick. Se we put them on the ledge outside of our apartment window for about 45 minutes first, to get them nice and cold. When they were ready, we bundled up, grabbed our camera and stepped out into the -10 night. After a few tries, we were able to blow some nice big, fat bubbles, but they wouldn't freeze fast enough, instead blowing away on the sub-arctic wind before popping into a sudsy dribble on the salty ground. For our next try, we blew a nice big bubble, and caught it on the tip of the still damp wand. After a few seconds, we saw the bubble freeze! Like something out of a CGI movie, it turned cloudy, starting at the bottom, and moving quickly up. We poked at it, and to our surprise, it was actually frozen! The more we poked at it, the more dented it became, making a slight cracking sound. After a little more poking, the bubble broke, shattered pieces clinging to the bubble wand like broken shars of really thin glass.

One thing we noticed is that the bubbles tended to break one of two ways: either shattering like glass, or collapsing on itself, looking like some sad piece of shed snake skin hanging off our now frozen bubble-blowing wand. After about 20 minutes of blowing bubbles and breaking them, we were too cold to play any more, so we headed back inside.

We're officially intrigued. What are your winter-only outside tricks?