Swedish Parker!

Showing my parents around Sweden for a few weeks. Couldn’t resist coming straight back up past the Arctic Circle, my favourite part of Sweden.

I’d never seen the Ice Hotel. It’s up there as Sweden’s most famous tourist attractions (it’d surely be #1 if it wasn’t an 18 hour train ride from Stockholm…).

So on our way to Abisko we made a quick detour to Jukkasjärvi, a tiny little town half an hour from Kiruna, up above the Arctic Circle.

At the beginning of every winter a hotel is built ENTIRELY from ice. They get the ice from the frozen Torne River that flows right beside it.

It’s one of those incredibly unique things that blows you away. Sure it’s bloody expensive just to go inside, and it’s a tourist mecca, but still… it’s a HOTEL MADE OF ICE!?!

We skipped the guided tour and headed straight for the best part of the Ice Hotel – the Absolut Ice Bar.

Of course Absolut Vodka is one of Sweden’s finest exports, up there with ABBA and IKEA. So it’s all very fitting.

You get to drink (anything of your choice, so long as it’s vodka) out of glasses made entirely of ice. It has unparalleled novelty value…

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=xDyabxaYeOU[/youtube]

They even go all out with the drink names – I had a “Wolf Paw” and an “Absolut Iceberg”.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=9FA3xCA6fwY[/youtube]

Oh and you can actually sleep in the hotel – on a bed made entirely of ice.

The “Art Suites” (they invite a bunch of artists from around the world to do up a few of the rooms each year…) were pretty sweet, but I still don’t think you can beat drinking vodka from a glass made of ice…

(even more Ice Hotel pics on flickr…)

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 12:56 am and is filed under Sweden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.