SO HOW COLD IS IT?

If your GPS is frozen, you know you have arrived at the IceHotel in Jukkasjarvii, Northern Sweden---located 200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. Most guests only stay in the IceHotel for one night, and it’s best to book reservations for the winter season, because the hotel melts back into the Torne River every spring. Since the bedrooms are around 5 degrees Celsius, the manager claims you sleep very well at night in your thermal sleeping bag on top of reindeer skins. Obviously, Rudolph overstayed his visit.

In the morning, you are treated to a cup of hot ligonberry juice, and if your lips freeze to the cup, I guess you can keep it. Couples come to Jukkasjarvii from all over the world to enjoy weddings in the ice chapel, and children are baptized there. I assume it’s a few drops from an ice cycle.

I was not lucky enough to experience the IceHotel, but did go to the coolest bar in Stockholm. The Absolut IceBar Stockholm is the world’s first permanent IceBar, chilled to a constant 5c/23degrees F. Not too many people are allowed to enter the bar at one time, but that’s no problem, because even dressed in snowsuits and mittens, it’s too cold to sit on an ice bench for too long.  However, it could be an innovative treatment for hemorrhoids.

Everything is frozen—the bar, the seats, the glasses---but even non-scientists know that vodka does not freeze. Consequently, it’s an Absolut treat to slug down a shot.

Scandinavia offers ice structures for fun. It’s a different story in Balea Lac, Romania, where high on a mountaintop, at an altitude of 6,000 ft. priests have blessed a church made of ice, which is cemented together with water and snow--kind of like in Arizona, but without the ice, water or snow. The Romanian church is a copy of an old church in Transylvania without the vampires.

Relations between the different Christian churches in Romania haven’t been very good over the years due to arguments relating to church ownership. The communists seized all the churches in Romania in 1945, and then later gave them to the Romanian Orthodox Church. They didn’t return some other churches to other denominations. What did the Godless communists know about such things?

But with the Ice Church all denominations can worship there. The arguments and misunderstandings can be put aside for a while until the whole thing melts. Then folks can resume bickering again until the winters freeze and the church is once more cemented together with water and snow.

Esther Blumenfeld (“A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water”) Carl Reiner