No, that ice bear is not staffing the actual reception at the Snowhotel Kirkenes – that happens in a brick and mortar type building with heating, computers and so on. But this is the entrance the actual place you sleep on your actual (literal) ice bed. (Ice = water = source, as a reminder of this weird little series I’ve begun.) When I first showed you Kirkenes, I promised a photo of said ice beds. But it turns out I neglected to photograph the actual beds themsevles- sorry. I really thought I’d done so. Allow the various other ice furniture shown below to spark your imagination, along with the instruction manual from the (regular building, heated) changing room. For orientation, the ice sculptures below are just inside the entrance in the snow mound you see at the bottom. That mound is the thing itself, but to be clear: one only sleeps in the room; one does not linger in it during the rest of the non-sleep time of one’s stay. One instead catches King Crab or hangs out in the heated guest lounge drinking hot tea :-)…or feeds the reindeer, pets the huskies or sits by the outdoor fire, all of which we’ll show you in future posts.
The first “source” entry was a photo I took in Ticino, nearly a week after I took these ice-sculpture photos inside the glacier at the top of the “Little Matterhorn” last November 1st – but seeing the glacier, ice, snow, rivers, frost on the grass around Zermatt in the mornings: all of those experiences helped me decide I’d need to try this series out. What else can be both shelter and sculpting material, cushion if you wall into it when it’s still soft, exercise medium when we swim, absolutely necessity for and source of the life-forms we know here on earth…and so many other things? There are more ice sculptures to come, from Nordkapp. But I figure first I’d show you the ones from Zermatt :-).
(so much world, so little time....) 