Ice Hotel

March 4th, 2018

Glenn has made it clear on a number of occasions that he is not interested in sleeping on a block of ice.  Even with sufficient padding and insulation, this is just not his cup of tea.  (The topic has come up in the context of potentially booking a stay at the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjarvi.)  So when I planned our trip to Sweden, I decided that we would stay at the "Arctic Gourmet Cabin" (more on that in a later post) and just visit the Ice Hotel during the day.  It is a hotel largely constructed from ice and snow every fall, which is open from December to April each year, at which point they close it because it starts to melt.  We went for a short tour of the place, which included a look at harvesting ice from the nearby river for next year's hotel, the ice chapel, which hosts 40-50 weddings every winter, and the Ice Bar, where drinks are served in ice glasses.  I suppose this was the original Ice Bar, a concept that has now spread to many other locations at this point.  During the day, the rooms in the hotel are open for guests to see, so we visited around 20 of them.  Each is designed by a different ice artist every year, and they were very beautiful and clever.  Some were dark and cave-like.  Some were bright and sunny.  Some had ice mazes one had to navigate or elaborate ice structures supporting the beds.  I particularly liked the one designed to look like a library, with shelves full of ice books, each book spine carved separately, and the one that looked like a underwater scene with jellyfish and coral carved out of ice.  I did not like the room where the bed was resting on the outstretched arms of some demon with glowing horns hovering over the bed.  That's not the kind of vibe I'm typically looking for in a bedroom.

I'm not sure what we expected, exactly, but the place was cold!  We didn't take pictures of too many of the rooms because our hands got cold and our cell phone batteries ceased to work, but here are a few photos.  You can find many other photos of the rooms online, if you're interested:  www.icehotel.com.