Back from my mini CNY celebration at Lund. Time to blog about Kiruna and clear some of my debts. Haha.. Sorry to have to 'owe' blog posts over the new year! =p

10 Feb - 13 Feb (Ice Hotel, Kiruna)

Having suffered a torturing 17 hours in the train, we finally arrived at Kiruna!


And our first stop: Ice Hotel, Jukkasjärvi.
Ice hotel is a very touristy place so of course, we can't afford to stay here. But we were able to come and visit la. We paid 100SEK (S$23) for the admission and went in to view the hotel.

This is the door to the rooms/suites in the hotel. I think it's rather cool as the whole building is made of ice but they still can run wires through to operate this automatic door.

Okay, so we went to see the rooms. There are PLENTY of rooms, each with a different design by a different designer. This year, the theme is flowers so the rooms then to be a little more flowery. According to the guide, as the Ice Hotel is re-constructed every year, they hold a contest for all who wishes to design a room in the Ice Hotel. Then they have a panel of judges to choose the nicest designs. And when winter is near, the selected designer are then brought into the empty Ice Hotel building to carve their designs. So here are some of the rooms:


Some of the rooms have only beds and some decorations on the walls but others have like a suite style with ice couches and arm chairs, or even a fire place! Haha.. Fake one la, of course. Just some blocks of ice with an orange lamp beneath.


The most important place, the Ice Church! The Church had been with Ice Hotel since the very beginning, possibly the structure to bring in the most revenue for the company. The guide told us that the Ice Church is a very popular place for weddings and they handle on average 2 weddings a day. After which, most couples will make their way to spend a night in the luxury suite.


The structure of the Ice Hotel is supposed to be very stable, as the building is made of snice, meaning a combination of snow and ice. This combination makes the building as stable as a concrete one. Yet, no matter how solid, it will still melt when winter is over and the temperature rises. So all the buildings have the 'n-shaped' arc so that when the building is melting, no part will cave inwards and the snice will just melt outside and flow down.
This is a sculpture made of snice. There are plenty of scultures like this all over the hotel. This one is inside one of the suites.

Last but not least, we have the Ice Bar. PC, YW and I each bought one alcoholic drink at the bar, served in the rocks.
So the bartender with the cute wig made us our drinks which cost 105SEK (S$24.15) each, out of which 25SEK (S$5.55) was for the cup as it is made of ice and therefore, cannot be reused for another customer.


Haha.. This pic is taken specially for WT. See, I'm still chewing ice! Haha.. I actually ate half of my cup before throwing it into the snow outside. Oops.. I littered.

After that, we headed to our hostel to spend the night there before going to Kurravana for the 2-day tour package we signed up for. So we went to Ripan and stayed in an Ice Igloo! Haha.. It was a good experience though I'm pretty sure I won't want to stay in there again. It's just too cold! The temperature inside was -2 degrees but I guess the sleeping bag is quite pro. So I still managed to keep warm and fall asleep. The difficult part was the waking up and we had to run out of the igloo. COOOOOOLLDDD......


If you were wondering where we were running to in the morning as we got up, we were actually given a very big room 5m away from the igloo. So we have private toilets, showers and our own sauna! Haha.. I think that room can fit like 20 people inside.


And then, we were on our way to the freezing land the next day! Haha..