As anybody who’s suffered through the I am Curious movies waiting for sex to happen, or Wild Strawberries waiting for the damn thing to just end already, already knows, Swedes have an unwholesome tolerance for tedium. Nowhere is this more manifest than in their willingness to put up with magisterial bureaucrats determined to protect them from the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. And I’m not just talking cradle-to-grave socialized living, here. I’m talking fire codes. Sweden must be the only place in the world to require fire extinguishers in igloos.
Being ice, the hotel returns each summer to the river from which it was quarried, and flows away.
Not that my hometown wouldn’t pull such a trick, if anybody could figure out how to build an igloo in Portland. But nobody seems to have done so, at least not that I’ve heard about. So it’s the Swedes who’re left to carry the ball. And carry it they do, because they’ve got a really persuasive igloo up above the Arctic Circle in Lapland. It’s a Swedish-modern sort of igloo they call the Ice Hotel; as the name suggests, the place is made out of ice.
And remade every year, because, being ice, the hotel returns each summer to the river from which it was quarried, and flows away. Every winter, it’s rebuilt room by room, ice-block by ice-block; and there, chiseled into the walls of the long hotel corridors, are niches with fire extinguishers.
Fire extinguishers! The entire building is made out of frozen water. The walls. The ceilings. The floors. The crystals in the crystal chandeliers, the bed my wife and I shared, the elegantly curved staircase leading to the eight-foot high platform beneath the bed. No need to put ice in your drinks, because the glasses in the ice bar are ice, along with the bar itself, and the stools you sit on at the bar. You couldn’t set this place on fire with a flamethrower. But if I’m remembering right what the football coach who taught eighth-grade general science told us, with enough heat — I’m thinking a thermonuclear flamethrower — might be able to ignite the metal in the fire extinguishers.
There you have it. The only flammable objects in the entire Ice Hotel are the fire extinguishers – except, of course, that by the time you got them hot enough to catch fire they wouldn’t, because they’d be at the bottom of a river of melted walls and ceilings and floors and chandeliers and beds and staircases and platforms and bar stools and liquor glasses and the bar the glasses used to sit on.
