The Ice Hotel

A slideshow of these pictures can be seen at :
http://picasaweb.google.com/achakra/HungaryAndTheIceHotel



So, Im not going to go into all the history and stuff about the Ice Hotel, but it is pretty damn cool. First of all the Ice Hotel is in Kiruna which is just about the northern most town in Sweden. As you can see from some of the pictures, given that we went in the middle of winter, and since its above the Arctic circle, the sun doesn't actuall rise above the horizon. In the morning it becomes lighter, and then the sun sets by around 1.30pm. It really screws with your internal clock, I could see how people can get seasonal affective disorder.
We took a 19 hour train from Stockholm overnight to get to the Hotel. I Think we rolled in around 9amish or so.
If you want to see where we were click here for a google maps view of it.
If you zoom out a bit, you kinda forget exactly how far north Stockholm is from New york for example, and then on top of that, the distance of how far north Sweden goes is close to half the distance from Miami to Portland, Maine. Sweden is a pretty long country.


(Below) Me trying to get my tongue stuck on the ice, no it doesn't work like it did in Dumb and Dumber. Some American guest saw me try it, and before Stephanie could snap off the picture, he's like yeah that doesn't work, its the first thing I tried.



Is it 'officially' a hotel made of ice?,, no not quite. So just for a quick run down of how it works: Every year, the Torne River (literally right behind the Ice Hotel location) freezes over. I think it freezes around October (although the locals claim that the avg temp is quite dramatically going up over the last 10 years and its freezing later and later in the year). Once the top layer of the river is completely frozen (which is around a mile wide? give or take?), a bunch of cutting and lifting equipment is used to actually lift gigantic ice blocks out of the river. If memory serves correct, we're looking at 6 ft x 3ft x 2 ft. They actually take these blocks and put them into a warehouse which is kept at -5 degrees all year round. Now the ice blocks used to make the ice hotel this year (say 2006) were actually harvested the previous year (2005, or spring 2006, I can't remember, but the previous 'ice' season let's say.
Ice is really cool, it moves, bends over times, develops cracks etc, and you can see this over the course of the few mos the Ice Hotel is in operation every year.

(below, yes a bar made of ice, yes those are stacked glasses made of ice, also did you know Absolut is a government run enterprise, its the very reason that no city in the United States has an Ice Bar yet because apparently bars or something in the US have to have more than one beer or liquor or something, dont ask me, someone there told me)



Now, the layout is a general lobby area with wings on the right and left which have rooms for people to stay in. I can't remember the number, but on one side is around 40 general rooms (just lights and ice bed). And on the other side is more rooms which also have lights, but this side decorated by artists from around the world. The artists submit their work every year and some 20-30 of them are selected. They fly up to the Ice Hotel, and learn how to work with snow and ice, then they apply their creative skills and create rooms. So each room is different.




When we get to the ice hotel, we go into a warm room that's connected to the actual ice hotel. Here we get special sub zero clothing (and yes its very necessary). With these special suits on, its fairly comfortable. The actual ice hotel is open for visitors during the day, and the concept of a 'room' is not quite like a normal hotel. Essentially u are paying for the ability to stay in a room from 10pm until morning (I think until around 8am).

There is a small ice church (yes church made of ice) next door. And also the warehouse I mentioned above. Funny thing, walking into the warehouse which is -5 degrees is actually comfortable, walking outside is usually colder.

(below, walking around giant columns of ice)



After getting to the hotel, we walked around and saw all the rooms, very cool. Then the sun set and immediately Steph and I thought we were going to pass out from sleepiness. Funny how darkness does that to you. We managed to find a chair to kind of zone out in, and then we were up and at em.
We walked up the road to a small restaurant (btw Kiruna is a mining town, Im not sure what type of ore they are mining there, but its apparently the largest or 2nd largest deposit of that type of ore in the world). While walking there we realize, there really isn't much around Kiruna since it is a mining town. We got something to eat there, and headed back to the Ice Hotel.

(below, this was one of the special artist rooms, out of the 40 or so artist made rooms, two of them are special 'suites', basically larger and more ornate)



At this point, we went to experience one of the highlights of being far north.. the northern lights!. Now, even though Ive studied a fair amount of physics in my time, I just assumed Id see a ton of northern lights the second I got out of the train. Whoops, I forgot the basic reasons that they happen
1) charged particles have to be emitted by the sun
2) it has to be clear
Ugh, so that's one thing we didn't see. Apparently its not uncommon to go to the Ice Hotel and miss it, you pretty much have to be lucky, or live there and look up at the sky all the time. But they had some pretty pictures of the lights on the web I enjoyed later :-).

Once we got to the Ice Hotel, it was time for some libations. We went to the Ice Bar, and got a couple of mixed drinks. Yes those glasses are made of ice. Here's something weird, there are I think 5-6 ice bars around the world, and all of the ice glasses made for these bars are actually made here in Kiruna (in that warehouse), and then shipped around.. seems kind of cost ineffective, but apparently one of the 'cool' things is that all of the ice glasses are made from water from the Torne river (which is very clean).

Another couple of interesting sidenotes. The vodkas are all just out on the bar surface (cuz its -5 degrees always in the hotel). The ice glasses are also outside, but the fruit juices are kept in a freezer (why? cuz the freezer is above 0 so the juices dont freeze). The juices actually end up melting your glass. Damn them, those are expensive drinks too! I think 15 USD for the first pop, and then 9 or something for refills. U can prob get around 3 drinks b4 having to buy a new glass.

(below, pretty cool lighting id say)



(below, me making a snow angle on the river Torne)


So, here's a funny story. There was a couple that was here at the Ice Hotel, turns out the guy was at Princeton the same time Stephanie was there. Small world. Anyway once we had a few drinks at the bar, we were starting to feel pretty chilled to the bone, so we went across the way to this bar (indoors) across the street.



Once we arrived at this bar, me being my slightly inebriated talkative self struck up a conversation with some of the locals. There were three of them at the table, and it turns out they all work on/at the Ice Hotel. Two of them, Mark and Julia had been at the hotel for many years. I think they had worked on 7 different hotels. They also happened to be one of the two 'special artists' that were working on a suite. At some point in the night, they were freaking out because the suites have to be finished by New Years, so I opened my big mouth and asked if they needed help. They were quite taken back, because, well to be honest, the hotel isn't cheap. Most people are pretty well off that go here, and they spend 100s of dollars on random stuff like dog sled trips, snowmobiling etc. Here we were offering to do manual labor. They accepted our offer, but they thought we were joking, little did they know.

(below, yup a chair made of ice)



Ok, now it was time for bed. Bed is interesting, its a bed made of ice, with crushed snow on top, covered by reindeer skins. On top of the skins, you put a sleeping bag (one of these special sub zero ones. Now remember the hotel is -5 degrees. What you do is get into u're thermals in the warm room next door, and then u make a mad dash with your sleeping bag, and boots on to your room. Its COLD! We quickly arrived at our room, turned the lights off and went to bed.

What sucked is that one time in the middle of the night, I had to go to the bathroom. Not fun in the freezing cold at all. After that I was pretty wide awake (Turns out being in underwear in -5 degrees does that to you.

We woke up to a glass of fresh warm lingonberry juice (Swedes seem to love this berry, they have it in jam format also). We got up, went over to the warm room, and got ready and packed up.



We walked over to the warm cafe across the street and got some breakfast. We ran into Mark and Julia again and said, ok, so how can we help. They were shocked, they really thought
a) we forgot the night b4
b) were joking
But nope we weren't. So they essentially went through the steps about how to make snis, and the general concept of how to build these walls, shape things etc. This was by far the highlight, and it didn't cost us a dime! Its quite simple to work with ice. You of course have shovels, buckets, water, and guess what you use to smooth things down? sand paper of course! And just as you'd figure it'd work with wood,, same thing, low vs high grit for added smoothness.

Mark and Julia turned out to be very cool. They were really thankful we helped, and we kept on trying to tell them that we were thankful to be allowed to help. We were essentially full on workers, we ate with the other employees, we went and had tea with them during the day etc. We had most of the day to hang out with them since we weren't catching the train until around 8pm at night. The entire time we thought they were both Swedish. It turns out that Julia was from Australia, and Mark was actually from upstate New York! crazy. They had met at the Ice Hotel and had been there since and also had gotten married. So we spent the day chatting with them, working 'on' the ice hotel, and listening to some good tunes off of Mark's laptop.

(below, me working on steps, its actually hard work!)








(below, Steph and I on two random chairs somewhere in the hotel)





(below, Steph admiring her work on smoothing out a wall in the suite).


(below, this was actually an ice sculpture in the warehouse).






(below, a cool ice couch)



(below, I thought this was a pretty cool fountain)



(below, getting snow to make snis)



(below, me smoothing out a wall)


(below, making steps)




(below, yup that was all us!)

Budapest, Hungary

(The slideshow of all the pictures shown here are at: http://picasaweb.google.com/achakra/HungaryAndTheIceHotel




In December 2006, I was on a business trip to Bangalore, and on the way back I decided to meet up with my good friend Stephanie Yang (high school buddy) who is currently a math professor working for a year in Stockholm. Since I had almost a week, we decided to do a travel packed trip which started in Stockholm. I arrived there from India, and then the following day we took off for Budapest. The Christmas holidays was right around the corner, and we kind of forgot that most of the Western world comes to standstill/crawl around Xmas time. But no worries, we were out to see the sights which were in full swing.

We took a pretty late flight out of Stockholm, and connected via Amsterdam. We got into Budapest pretty late. We didn't even realize that we had booked a car/limo, but sure enough one showed up. Good thing cuz we really didn't realize how much conversational difficulty we were about to have.

We get into the room and fell asleep. In the morning, I woke up and got ready first so I could go and get some cash from the ATM machine. So here's a funny story. So to walk into our room, you actually have to go through a hallway through a door into a small corridor. Now in this corridor are two doors, one was our room, and the other one was another hostel room. Now, the way the keys work, is that the doors use keys to lock both sides. So to get in and lock your room door and the corridor, you have to flip a key 4 times (outside in the hallway, inside in the corridor, then inside the corridor again on your room door, then inside your room to finally lock your room door). Confusing right? Ok not that much, Im just trying to make an excuse for myself. Now one small caveat, the key was used for the dead lock, otherwise, the bottom lock on each door would self-lock. We only had one set of keys, so I then left our room, locked our door, went into the corridor, opened the corridor, LEFT The keys in he lock, and then shut the door behind me. Essentially I locked myself out of the corridor with the keys hanging in on the other side. Lovely start to the day. I go downstairs, and somehow managed to convey that I had locked myself out. These two girls that were working the front desk somehow understood and came up with me. They found some keys , but none of them could unlock the door properly because I had left the other set of keys in the other side. Stephanie was locked in our hotel room. Our only hope at this point was to wake up the person that had checked into the other room inside the corridor. We banged and banged on the window (facing into the hallway) to no avail. Finally, I contrived up a scheme to unhinge the key from the lock on the inside. There was a small metal grating above the door, I managed to pull up a chair, put a broom through it, pull myself up to the grating, stick my head through it, and try to use the broom to dislodge the key. No luck, not enough leverage. Then finally genius came to me, I would take the spare set of keys, and throw them up to Stephanie through the room window. As I tried to explain my plan to the two girls trying to help me (and laughing at me quite mercilessly), they finally understood it just when the person in the other room opened their door and took out the key from the lock on the otherside in the corridor. Lovely start to the day.

First of all, Budapest is a gorgeous city. Somehow alot of the older architectures and what not have survived all the various empires and wars that have rolled through this area. The Danube river kind of splits the city into halves. Literally, one side of the river is called Buda, and the other side of the river is called Pest (go figure). There's a few very beautiful bridges that span it.



As you can see, the river front buildings are quite beautiful and nicely lit up at night.



The Matthias church is a famous church in the heart of Budapest. (below)







Im pretty sure (below) this picture was taken on the Pest side of the city. On the opposite side (in Buda) is what's known as the Castle District (once again go figure). The huge building you see there is the Royal Palace. Im not positive when the last monarch sat there, but obviously there is certainly not one now. The Germans actually used it as a command post in WWII. There was fierce fighting there, and it actually was damaged badly, what we see now is post reconstruction.



(Below). Im not exactly sure what these are called, but they were damn good. Kind of like a doughy cinnamony thing. Really cool to watch them make it as they rolled/cooked over those hot coals in the foreground. Also, given that we were in eastern europe in the dead of winter, a nice place to warm up your hands. We never would have bothered trying them if it wasn't for Stephanie's friend's friend who was kind enough to take us to lunch and give us some tips on what to eat. One thing you'll realize is that English is very skimpy in these parts, and you end up doing alot of pointing and gesturing.





Im not quite sure about the chronological order, but I should add somewhere in here that Stephanie somehow managed to lose her wallet. She freaked out for a bit, then I managed to convince her that it was all good (since she has her Passport), so not to worry. One thing I found intersting also, is that when we landed in the STockholm airport, there was never any immigration officials/passport control, odd.

(Below), we decided to take a trip a bit out of town. Im not sure if we were still exactly in Budapest or not, but definitely the outskirts if at all. There was an old Roman garrison out here which was excavated. It was actually closed, but we jumped the fence and walked around it anyway. We had to take a train (really their version of a light rail) to get out there. While walking around trying to find this place, we happened upon this choice piece of art work.







(the ruins below).



Heh heh,, if you dont know why this is funny, well u'll just have to not know (below)



(Below), unfortunately i didn't take a very good picture of this place, but its a famous little coffee shop (I think called Central Cafe). Apparently all the intellectuals and authors and what not used to congregate here. Budapest used to have one of the richest coffee shop cultures in Europe, but that number has greatly dwindled. You wont find Starbucks here (yet). I thought the food was fantastic, and they had some nice teas. We ran into some fellow Americans, turns out they were from the Bay area, so I jumped into a short discussion about it with them as its my 2nd home.



(Below) The Hungarian State opera house. I thought that this place was very very cool. We took a tour of the place, and quite a lot of cool stories were told to us. First of all, it was commissioned by Emperor Franz Joseph of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The acoustics of the place are phenomenal. Everything about this place screamed royalty. The emperor had his own box, he even had his own entrance and entertainment parlour for his guests. Much of the artwork, rugs, tapestries, etc. are still the originals. Couple of cool stories:
- It was pointed out to us that each of the seats had little vents underneath. And given that it was created in 1880s, it immediately begs the question, what were the vents for? Turns out they used to ship in huge blocks of ice from the mountains, and then using some sort of air blowing technology (dunno what though), they literally air conditioned the place for the warm summer months.
- I have to point out that our guide was possibly one of the most attractive women Ive ever seen, Im not sure why this is important, but Stephanie would agree that for a trip description to be complete, I have to mentoin it.
- Funny story: There was set construction going on in the background when we were in the main auditorium listening to her historical recounts. At one point, she stopped speaking, started laughing, and then pointed out that its good that none of us speak Hungarian. I guess those guys doing the set construction were pretty rough around the edges.



(Below) This was another cool thing that we saw. Its called the terror museum. As we all know, Hungary used to be a part of the Soviet Bloc. I was always under the impression that the Russians did alot for these countries. Now that Ive visited both Poland and Hungary, that isn't true at all. In general, all they did was provide heavy military support for the communist party as to ensure that they remained in power. The building below used to be the Kgb's headquarters in Budapest. The crazy stories of torture, and espionage, backstabbing, abductions, paranoia, are mind blowing. Everyone was paranoid of everyone. The guys at the top were usually replaced every so often never to be heard of again. Its fitting that they have turned this ghastly building into a reminder of what was.
Also interesting is that Russian was taught in Hungary during the cold war. There is still quite alot of resentment against the Russians in these former Soviet states. Its interesting to think that the current generation of young Hungarians are the first ones that weren't exposed to that crazy period in our history.



(Below)
Steph and I decided to relax in the famous Turkish mineral baths located through Budapest. Its all naturally heated water from underground springs. Even though it was close to freezing outside, these baths were nice and relaxing. They have various concentrations of different minerals at diff temperatures (they also have cold pools). . We were too tired to go, but apparently some of these baths turn into raves on certain nights. Seems odd to mix alcohol and hot water with very loud music, at the same time intriguing.
There's a slightly funny gross story here. First of all, it seems that ALL Hungarians are thin, I think its a general eastern block thing. Anyhow,, somehow, all the overweight ones ended up at this spa. And when I mean overweight, I mean like American overweight. Anyway, there was this one older overweight lady getting into the pool we were currently in, and well to put it delicately, she hadn't quite finished adjusting her swimsuit so you could more or less see her private part (the one south of the border). And its not like one of those things where she could look down and notice her mistake, no.. too much stomach flab in the way, nope, she was just walking around completely exposed. Not knowing Hungarian and being too shy, we didn't do anything about it, but then we didn't feel bad because no one seemed to want to mention it to her. Oh well, I guess people stay pretty private within themselves at these spas.



(Below), once again, self evident why its funny, u may have to look at a larger version of the picture.



(Below)
The Budapest subway system. I wanted to mention one thing. So this is something that the Russians actually provided help with. They literally created these lines over 40 years ago. And if you can take a closer look at these pictures, you can see that it doesn't look like much has improved in those forty years. Also, Ive heard (never seen ) that subway stations in Moscow are close to 100meters below the surface. Apparently this is so they can literally house the populace in case of nuclear attack. I'm not exactly sure if its the same reason here, but these subway stations were very far down also. They also had these crazy escalators which just ooozed some sort of communist feel. And man did they move fast. I was discussing my trip with Keya (an old childhood friend who actually lived near Budapest for a year once upon a time), and her and her husband actually saw an old man die on these escalators! He just missed his timing on getting onto the step and ended up falling almost all the way down the length of the escalator. Sad.

I will say this though, brutal efficiency is the best way to describe these trains.





(Below). Ok, I dont know why I decided to take a picture of the toilet, but I just wanted to point out the odd design of this thing. This is a bit graphic in description so please ffwd down if you've just eaten. But if you notice the water in the bottom is located near the front as opposed to any other toilet Ive seen where the hole is located near the back of the toilet bowl. As you can imagine, your poo falls not into the water which covers up the odor, but right onto the porcelain with no water. Well, I dont know if the communists didn't like people to hang out on the toilet all day, but you certainly dont want to spend anymore time than necessary.



(Below) once again, funny for obvious reasons.



(Below) My partner in crime, Stephanie, at the dumps with poppy restaurant.



(Below)
So inside of the hill that the Royal Palace is built on is an extensive system of caves and tunnels. From what I can remember, these were in fact manmade. Today they have been converted into a museum. What I find interesting is the fact that many of these tunnels have cave men art/drawings on them, but they are all done by modern artists. Kinda funny I thought. Its interesting, kind of warm and damp down there. For some reason, they had this one place with ivy covered walls, and a couple of fountains. Weird though because the fountains were shooting out wine. It was pretty disgusting looking wine, not exactly there for consumption . either way, expensive display case.





(below)
heh, so apparently Santa Clause is from Finland.