I arrived in Kiruna shortly after 2:30 PM.  This picture was taken from my hotel room at approximately 4:00 PM.

 

I got to the Ice Hotel at about 10:00 AM the next  morning.  Here’s a picture of the entrance to the Ice Hotel.  The doors are covered in Reindeer hide and the handles are made of antlers.

 

 

This is what I was first greeted with upon entering the Ice Hotel.  There were sculptures like this all over.  The back wall was actually purple as it was backlit by a purple light.

 

 

This is the hallway that leads through the Ice Hotel and towards the Ice Bar.  The pillars aren’t necessary during middle of the winter, as the hotel will hold itself up.  During the spring, they help to keep the ceiling from collapsing when the weather gets warmer.

 

 

Partway down the hallway was this table made of ice.

 

 

This was my room.  The orange glow under the bed was from a lamp.  The strange cloud on the right of this picture is my breath.

 

 

There were also larger, more expensive rooms that had ice carvings in them.  This circular piece of ice at the head of this bed had fiber optic cable running through it to product the green light.

 

 

This is a larger view of the bed from the previous picture.

 

 

This picture and the following two pictures are from a Viking themed room.  The bed was placed in a boat carved from ice and the walls were covered in Viking symbols.

 

 

You can see the entire Viking boat/bed in this picture.

 

 

It’s not so easy to see, but there is a snake carved on this ice pillar and the snake has Viking runes carved over the length of it’s body.

 

 

And this was another of the larger rooms.  The sculptures in the rear of the room depict a hunter about to kill (or be killed by) a bear.

 

 

At the far end of the Ice Hotel was the Absolut Ice Bar.  Every drink they served had Absolut Vodka in it.  It is difficult to tell in this picture but the walls appear to have a mottled texture.  To achieve this, two men threw 60,000 snowballs at the walls and ceiling.

 

 

This is the opposite side of the room from the bar in the Ice Bar.  The seats were simply blocks of ice covered in reindeer skins.  The tables were solid ice.

 

 

This was my “ice glass” that I had most of my drinks in throughout the evening.  You can see that the top of the glass is a little curved in places.  This is from my mouth melting the glass.  I eventually had to get a different glass as I had melted too much of my first one.

 

 

 

This is one of the "menus" from the Ice Bar.  It's almost needless to say but you have to go to the restaurant across the street if you're actually hungry.

 

This was one of the many ice sculptures placed throughout the Ice Hotel.

 

This chandelier is actually made of ice.  The frame of it is metal and there are fiber optic cables that run through it and up to a lamp outside the Ice Hotel.

 

Its hard to see the woman in this picture, but she’s carving out this ice sculpture just outside of the Ice Hotel.

 

 

This sculpture was located between the Ice Hotel and the ice church.

 

 

This picture and the next one show panels that were carved into packed snow and placed on the wall of the inside of the ice church.  They are replicas of actual panels located in a church in Jukkasjärvi.

 

 

This is the other panel in the ice church.

 

 

And some more ice sculptures.  These were in the ice church.

 

 

Here I am enjoying a nice cold beverage in the ice church.

 

 

Here is one of the many dogsleds that I saw while walking on the frozen River Torne.

 

 

This was the most popular way to get around near the Ice Hotel…an ice scooter.

 

 

Farther up the river was a Sami village.  The Sami are similar to the Eskimos in Alaska and Canada.

 

 

This is a VERY small house on top of a pole in the Sami village. It resembled a birdhouse more than anything else.

 

 

My diploma!

 

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