France-tastic

And to finish off holiday stories, while I'm at it, for the third post today:

In other adventures, we took a boat to Finland! Accompanied by Camilla and Patrick (my sister and her husband for those of you not familiar with my family tree) we hopped on this boat:

...and sailed to Helsinki. The cruise takes 40 hours all up, and includes about 8 hours in Helsinki, and about 31 hours of eating, drinking, dancing, watching cabaret shows, and buying duty-free booze (though you can't usually buy duty-free stuff between EU countries, the genius of this cruise is that it docks for about 4 minutes on a little island called Åland in the Baltic Sea, which though not an independent country but actually part of Finland, is not part of the EU, and this all means that you can buy all the booze you can carry!)! Here are photos of some of the above activites:

The 8 hours in Helsinki were mostly spent trying to avoid the bitter, bitter cold, and trying to stay awake after very little sleep, and far too much dancing to cheesy Finnish pop! However, we did squeeze in a little tourist bus tour of the city, which was about all the sight-seeing we could cope with. Helsinki is actually a really pretty city (though bitterly, bitterly cold. Did I mention that?), and has some interesting buildings, including the Temple Rock Church, a Lutheran church that was built only in the last 50 years or so, I think, but looks like it should be a pagan temple from long ago times! Basically the architects were told to build a church on a little rocky mountain/hill, and decided the mountain/hill was so beautiful, it was a shame to raze it for a traditional church building, and instead just drilled out a round chamber from the actual rock, and put something like 26 km of copper wire into a big coil (around 10 m in diameter!), and turned that into the roof! And that is about all they did. The church is actually really amazing, these photos really don't do it justice (the second is just the roof):

This is a more normal church, but still really beautiful:

Our holiday also included Christmas of course, including all the eating that goes with that! We had two big Christmas feasts, the first on an island in "Skärgården" (the Stockholm archipelago), where we had a "julbord" (Swedish Christmas feast) in a hotel which was just fantastic, more herring than you could poke a stick at!

The second feast was of course on Christmas eve itself, prepared by the less famous, but no less talented in the julbord department, Camilla (with a little help from the rest of us- and I mean little)!

Aside from eating endless quantities of herring, salmon, reindeer meat, köttbullar, and ris a la malta, there was much silliness and general merriment!

From left, my cousin Dennis, me, Alex, my aunt Kerstin, Patrick, Camilla, and my grandmother. Behind the camera is my other cousin Simone, who some of you have met.

Camilla getting musical. (No guitar handy)

Cousins Dennis and Simone, and doggie Lotta, dressed for Christmas.

Alex and mormor deciding language was not a problem!

We also fitted in an icehockey game, and saw Patrick's team SSK slide home with a very unexpected 4-1 victory at Scaniarinken! Alex was so impressed, he even bought a T-shirt!

Finally, on our last day in Sweden, the real snow came, and Alex got to try his hand at shovelling snow from the driveway, in order to get the car up it!

He even continued to shovel a path for Lotta (my sister's little King Charles Spaniel), who was almost shorter than the snow level! So cute!

Camilla and Patrick's gorgeous house, which we then left to go back to Paris in time for New Years with John and Shari. Those photos will have to wait, this is more than long enough already!

Pushing ahead with updates, here are more photos from Sweden adventures, which have been talked about here, as well as final reminscings of a holiday now long past!

Alex and myself skiing in Abisko, on the way home from the pub!

After the towel got a little cold, we decided long johns and shoes were more appropriate. The guy next to us thought his outfit even more appropriate...

Some of the very cute doggies who pulled my sled for several ours. Cute, though little bastards, not once did they wait for me after the many times I was thrown of the sled!

Finally, the photos from the holiday adventures! I'll start of with the ice hotel photos, because they are definitely the coolest! The accompanying rave about this amazing place can be found here.

Thanks Camilla for the camera cable which I got yesterday!

Alex outside the main entrance, at probably about 2 pm. Short days indeed. The doors are covered with reindeer hides, and the door handles are antlers.

Don't you think it looks just like something out of Narnia? Even the chandelier is ice!

Some examples of the more expensive suites, each decorated in a different style, all amazing!

This one is the snowball room, photo taken without a flash to show the cool lighting they put in too. And the bed at the bottom shows the scale of the snowballs. Huge!

A moon room with more mood lighting! The shady character is Alex...

My favourite room, a little house, and the bed is on the floor above- all out of ice!!

A few drinks before bedtime!

Alex decides to take a rest on a pew in the Ice church, consectrated each year by a local priest.

Not the most flattering photo of me the morning after (if you can even find me underneath all that blanket!), but you can see the bed set up. A very serious sleeping bag indeed...

Cheers!

Enjoy your drinks this friday; for those of you setting out to minus five!

A pure, quiet, cold world coloured in nothing but white and pale blue, the snow damping all sounds and the snow reflecting what little light the Arctic sun gave.

Photos of this post can now be found here! The photos in this post were ripped off various internet sites!

Spending 2800 kronor (roughly €280 or AU$560) a night on a room without your own bathroom or even a door might not be everybody's idea of good holiday value, nor might sleeping in -5 °C temperatures or drinking in a bar where the bartender keeps the juice in the fridge to keep it warm sound like a lot of fun. But it was!

The ICEHOTEL near Kiruna in the far north of Sweden is an absolutely magical place, and it gets a very enthousiastic recommendation from Alex and me. Yes, Sweden is far away, and it is certainly expensive and cold up there, but this place is so different to any other place you'll see (including imitation icebars in cities including Stockholm, Milan, London, and even Sydney), and well off the oft-trodden path between London and Rome, and so amazingly spectacularly beautiful and awe inspiring that pictures definitely don't do it justice. (Disclaimer- the author is receiving no cash for these comments, but would be most happy to.) Seriously, next time you are wandering North in the winter time, go and check it out!

The hotel basically functions like a kind of museum during the day. All the rooms are open to the public between 10 and 6 pm, and you can wander around and look at all the rooms and common areas. Some of the rooms (the suites- doulble the previously mentioned prices!) are decorated by ice-sculptors and artists from all over the world, each room in a unique style.

One of my favourites was a normal room, which contained a mini-house built out of icebricks, with a doorway entry, a sitting room with benches made out of ice, and a ceiling high enough to stand comfortably, and the bed on the upper floor, up a spiral staircase also made out of ice, above the sitting room. Just amazing. Other rooms were more simply decorated with ice sculptures and statues, and sometimes amazingly intricate snow carvings. One quite creepy room had a big pile of heads carved out of snow! Another had Escher images carved out of ice, with the contrast against the perfectly clear ice given by packing some of the shapes with snow. The non-suite rooms (ours!) were much more plain, just small rooms with walls and roof made out snow, and a bed made out of ice, with a matress and reindeer skins on top.

The central hallway was a magnificent passage lined with huge, clear, slightly bluish columns, a room you could just imagine the white witch from Narnia sweeping through, towards her throne. Even the crystals in the chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling were carved ice!

The ice for the hotel comes from the adjacent Torne river, and is carved out of the river each February, when the ice is at its thickest and best. They fence of a section of the river, and plow the snow off to encourage deeper freezing, since snow insulates the river from the cold air and prevents deep freezing- and it must be frozen down to well over a metre. The ice from this river is recognised as the best in the world and is exported to such far flung places as Brazil and the Sahara desert! The amazing clarity and lack of air bubbles or cracks comes from the fact that the river is rapidly moving as it freezes. The ice is then sawn out in huge blocks and stored in a -5 °C coolroom over the summer, until building of the hotel begins each October.

The ice is easily clean enough to drink from, once it is sawn into 10 cm cubes and holes are drilled into them and the holes filled with delicious and highly alcoholic (to stop both the drink and the drinker from freezing of course) mixtures by the Absolut Icebar bartenders on top of his or her ice counter, that only needs a bit of a scrape down come clean-up time! Then you can sit down on an ice seat at an ice table and enjoy your drink- with gloves on! Alex and I sampled several tasty concoctions, figuring we needed all the help we could get before settling into our cosy room, including a fiery Absolut pepper, apple and lime mixture!

Then it was time to don our long johns and brave the night! Armed with a sleeping bag rated to -20 °C, we had a surprisingly good night's sleep, and were awoken to a glass of hot, sweet and delicious lingonberry juice, before setting off for a tasty buffet breakfast in a balmy 20-something degree heated restaurant. Bliss!

We took heaps of photos, but the little camera cable is still on its world tour, hopefully to be landing in Paris quite soon, when I'll put up a monster photo post!

To summarise- the icehotel is absolutly amazing and we loved it!

*Photographical evidence of the following stories will be forthcoming. Camera cable remains to be found. Photographical evidence is now here!

The week before Christmas, Alex and I took a side trip to the far north of Sweden, landing in Kiruna, the northern-most airport in Sweden, 200 km inside the arctic circle, and rather chilly this time of the year! We were there the shortest day of the year, when the sun doesn't actually rise at all- that's a non-existent day! A little train trip took us to Abisko, a town of around 160 people, just a stone's throw from the nowegian border, and almost as far north as you can go in Sweden. It is on the edge of the Abisko National Park, and the Torne Träsk, one of the largest lakes in Sweden.

Arriving just as it was getting dark, at about 1.30 pm, Alex and I took advantage of the remaining dusk to take a bit of a skiing tour, borrowing a couple of sets of slightly rusty cross-country skis from the hostel. Quite a few falls ensued, the worst of which came after a downhill race, when I discovered I couldn't stop and was heading for a road, and basically had to throw myself at the ground. Ouch! Never-the-less, we explored the area as well as we could in the rapidly dwindling light, including throwing rocks at the lake to check the strength of the ice (not strong enough, we decided) and scaring local dogs with the antics of crazy tourists who willingly spend the day outside skiing! You would think that dinner of fried smoked reindeer (really yum!) washed down with a couple of beers would improve the skiing capabilities, but alas, it was not so, and many more falls were had on the way home.

At the hostel, we found a German couple and a Mexican couple, both of who were or had been living in Sweden, as well as the owner of the place, Örjan, who explained to us that there was not so much hot water, so it was best to shower in the sauna with a bucket of water, so grab your soap, and lets go for the communal wash. The sauna was fantastic, a wood-fired thing in a little hut, with water brought in drums from the house. Örjan didn't really join us for the sauna, but he explained that he usually takes his nightly shower there. So after the washing rituals were completed, just as we were getting hot and steamy (literally, not figuratively), and relaxed, and our bruises starting to tenderise, Fabian-the-German mentioned that the Mexicans had gone for a mid-sauna-snow-roll the previous night. So out we went. Woo-hoo, what a heart-starter! I don't think this is a move that should be attempted by any senior sauna suspects- Could end very badly and coldly indeed!

Luckily we were all strong of heart, and just as we were defrosting back in the sauna, Fabian's girlfriend, who had abstained from the sauna, came and banged on the door with the shout "Northern lights!" So out into the snow we went again. After 10 minutes or so, the towel and the lack of shoes started to be felt, so we jimmied into our long-johns, jackets and shoes, and lined up our front-row seats for the evening's display. We were really lucky because it had been overcast all day, and snowing the night before (and ended up snowing the next day and night as well), but the sky cleared up beautifully this particular night. And as we barely noticed our hair freezing to ice, we watched, completely awestruck, as the sky danced with light all around us. It wasn't as bright or as colourful as some of the auroras you sometimes see in photos, but it was still absolutely amazing. This is a picture I found on the internet that most closely matches the colour and intensity of what we saw. We did take photos, but they didn't turn out (I think you definitely need better equipment to photograph this sort of thing).



Hmm, I think I'll continue a bit later, there are lots more things to tell, and I'm getting hungry for lunch!

So difficult to go back to work after a fantastic holiday in wintery Sweden (and briefly in Finland!), endless quantities of deliciously decadent Christmas food, as well as the Christmas, holiday, and new year's eve rations of booze!

There were long stints of sitting around on snug sofas, glögg (yummy Swedish spiced wine hot drink) in hand, Christmas carols on the radio, and the snow painting the world a beautiful shade of sparkly white outside, and what felt like even longer stints lying battered and bruised in various piles of snow after being thrown from a husky sled or after trying out the dangers of drinking and skiing.

A memorable highlight was a Northern Lights show, which we watched in -10 degree temperature, barefoot in the snow, dressed in only a towel, our wet hair freezing to little crunchy icicles around our ears. Magic. (The guy on the right is our German sauna companion whose girlfriend took the photo.)

After a flight like one would expect from budget airline Ryanair back to Paris, we celebrated Saint Sylvestre Algerian-style with John and Shari, in a Montmartre cous-cous restaurant, helped to the dance floor by three bottles of Algerian red and a male belly dancer! Not quite what I expected from New Years in Paris, but fantastic fun!

Hopefully I will soon find the little cord that connects my camera to my computer (which may or may not be in Sweden- the cord, not the computer) so that I can show you all some photos of our adventures!

Until then, I can only hope that everyone had as fantastic a break as we did though hopefully warmer and less bruised!