Ice Is Also Not-So-Great: A Virtual Stay at The Ice Hotel
I If I could go anywhere in the world it would be the Ice Hotel in Sweden. I have this burning desire to go to a place colder than a witches, well, “tippy hat.”
I’m sitting here at my computer terminal in Seattle Washingtonand the temperature is a (record) sweltering 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
I have a low tolerance for “sweltering” and want to go where the temperature reads a chilly minus twenty-eight degrees Celsius. Read my lips: minus twenty-eight degree Celsius. Am I mad? No, just hot. And more than a little desperate. I want to go where it’s cold.
I close my eyes, and concentrate real hard—and lo and behold, I’m in Sweden.
“You need only a toothbrush (not electric, please!) and a change of underwear,” a representative from the Ice Hotel tells me.
I’m in a town called Kiruna, a iron-mining center. (125 miles inside the Arctic Circleas a matter of fantasy.) From here, a dog sled team will take me to the Ice Hotel.
My spiffy Donna Karen jacket and trousers, with coordinated accessories (it’s my fantasy, remember!) are replaced by a one-piece “snow-scooter dress.” Made of beaver nylon, and air-lock cuffs. (Guaranteed to protect the human body down to a temperature minus twenty-two degrees Celsius.)
Jolly good, especially since that’s the exact temperature that the LED thermometer is blinking at me.
Ten miles later, I’m standing outside of the biggest darn snow fort I’d ever seen in my life. Six thousand square feet of snow and ice.
Once inside, I can only stare.
“Those ice pillars carry the structures entire weight—four thousand tons of densely packed snow and ice,” the desk clerk says. A five-ton stalagmite carved to resemble a Swedish vodka bottle is on one side of the ice room, Inspired, I do what any tourist would do under the circumstances, head straight for the bar.
“What’ll you have?” a man bundled up like a polar bear asks.
I resist the urge to say, “something cold,” (get a grip!) and take a measured breath. “What do you suggest?”
“I serve a mean Day-Glo blue vodka cocktail.”
“What! no Snappy Tom juice?”
That remark is greeted by a (I can’t resist) frozen smile.
The blue vodka will be fine, I mumble.
He hands me an ice glass. Not a glass filled with ice, but a glass made out of ice!
The most I can say for the drink is that it’s blue, like me. I drink it anyway. Maybe, it’ll warm my heart. (Or whatever internal organ that’s left unfrozen.)”This place reminds me of gigantic ice fort.”
“Funny you should say that,” The bartender said. As a matter of act, that’s how the Ice Hotel came about.
“It was a day dream of this environmental engineer from the Kiruna mines. It seems he and his buddies were deep into their vodka troikas when someone suggested they build a hotel like the ice forts they made when they were kids.”
”No!”
”I lie, I die, or turn into an eskimo pie,” he said.
Yes sir, he built his first ice hotel. It was kind of modest. Just an igloo of about 700 feet. It had a huge bed made from river ice. When the ice hotel melted in the spring, a bigger one was built. And around 1991 an architect from Gothenburg was brought in and the operation was expanded to what it is to the present day.
Who says the Swedes don’t have a sense of humor?
He gives me another frozen fish look and said that their “little joke” was fast becoming a must-see for people all over the world. People like me paid two hundred dollars a pop to freeze their buns off. Where else can you stay where you bed is made out of river ice?
What’s more, there are plans afoot to have a Golf Suite with an indoor driving range and the Honeymoon Suite with a four-poster bed with an ice canopy with a rose trellis motif.
I start to say that I didn’t pay anything to stay here, that I was only here compliments of an over-active imagination, my fantasy was wearing a little thin, and I really wanted to check out of the Ice Hotel and go back to where it snowed about three days of the year.
But it was not to be. Clicking my mukluks three times and wishing myself home wasn’t gonna do it. It seems like I was going to have to pay penance and spent at least one night in the Ice Hotel.
My bed dominated the bedroom. A big chunk of ice with a mattress of reindeer skins. Not too inspiring.
Now, as you’ve probably guessed by now, in this place, you just don’t turn down your bed and jump in. You prepare for bed with as much planning as an ascent on Mt.Everest.
I take out the mummy bag, and fresh linen to protect my body from any moisture buildup and climb upon the chunk of ice. I thank the Norse god, Loki for the reindeer skins that are wedged between my body and the ice floe.
To try and sleep, I recite Robert Frost’s poem, “The World”.
”Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice…” but since I’m convinced that my world has come to an end, I skip to the last verse “…To say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice.”
The walls start to buckle and melt, just they do after the first rain in April or May.
Inside a few minutes the only thing that’s left of the Ice Hotel is a large body of water that looks suspiciously like the view of Puget Sound from my living room window.
I’m back. Outside the temperature reads a wonderful, (hot, but I can live with it!) 95 degrees Fahenheit.
Written by Jo Adamson
Freelance writer, Playwright
The First Official Trailer for Jake’s new movie “Hotel For Dogs.”
Video Rating: 4 / 5