This year's Christmas was spectacular! And that is why this Christmas page is spectacularly late... 

This Christmas all members of the family were gathered, including Emma and my brother's girlfriend Angela. It was nice to be able to show Emma how we celebrate Christmas and New Year's after experiencing it with her and her family last year, and she seemed to enjoy it too.

It was a great Christmas, with delicious Christmas food, cozy Christmas music, and lots of white snow. When decorating the Christmas tree Emma put up two Japanese ornaments putting a nice touch to it. 

This year is my parents' 30th wedding anniversary, and our present to them was a secret trip right after Christmas. We have been planning for this since summer, and on Christmas Eve we finally told them the destination - Kiruna in northern Sweden. By the way, did you know that up until maybe 10 years ago Kirunas was the largest city in the world, area wise? The population however is very low.

In the morning of December 26th we drove to Stockholm and took a flight up to Kiruna. After checking out our luggage we got on a bus and went  straight to the world famous Ice Hotel. The first thing that struck me was that there were many normal wooden buildings. The only thing in snow and ice is the actual hotel. The restaurants, shops and other facilities are all in wooden houses. The hotel is built of ice, snow, and "snice" - a mixture of ice and snow that is as isolating as snow and as hard as ice. The temperature inside the hotel is always a constant -5° C degrees, which means you have to sleep in a sleeping bag not to freeze to death. Contrary to what you might think, it is important to dress as lightly as possible inside the sleeping bag. If you wear to warm clothes you will sweat, and the sweat will then cool down your body making the sleeping bag useless. I had no problems going to sleep - it was comfortable, warm and all that - but I didn't close the hole for my face tightly enough, so I woke up in the middle of the night freezing and worrying that I might catch a cold. Everyone else slept like babies though. 

Before we went to bed all the rooms were open for all guests. We slept in normal rooms, which consisted only of a double bed and a small ice sculpture, but the suites were designed completely by different artists, which means that the whole room basically was a big piece of art. It was very impressive. Unfortunately I didn't bring a tripod for my camera, so I couldn't take any good pictures with the light, and when using the flash the mood is totally different. In one room there was a Japanese man still working. The room looked like an old Japanese home with open fire in the middle. Very interesting. At 19.00 the rooms were closed to other guests, so we went to the Absolut Ice Bar and took a few drinks in ice glasses. It was nice.

The next day we were picked up by a nice man with a van with lots of things to tell about Kiruna and its history. He is a former worker in the Kiruna mine, and that was where he took us. The Kiruna mine is huge, and we drove down in tunnels 500 m under the ground. That is where he keeps his new company - Kiruna Svampodling AB. Apparently, the conditions for growing shiitake mushrooms are perfect in the mines. He sells shiitake mushrooms mainly to restaurants in Stockholm, but also in other countries. When going back up to the daylight he asked us if we had ever experienced real darkness. He then switched off the engine and it was pitch black. But then he told us to wave our hands in front of us, and asked us if we couldn't see it - and we could! Kind of. The brain wants to see the hand, so you can see a kind of faint light shadow of your hand moving. Very interesting.

In the evening he took us to our new hotel (one night at the Ice Hotel was enough for our wallets...). This hotel turned out to be just as interesting as the Ice Hotel, only in a different, and not always so pleasant way. This hotel was just like Fawlty Towers! The service was...weird, and the personnel was totally confused. The best thing was the building. It was filled with strange staircases and halls, and it even had a little sauna. We were confused from the start, because when we came through the doors we noticed that it was a pizza restaurant. We then told the man behind the counter (the would-be Basil) that we had booked, but he didn't believe us, but fortunately they had rooms, so it turned out ok anyway. Before going to bed we had pizzas in the restaurant. During that time we heard the guy behind the counter talking in the phone in English, telling whoever was calling asking for a room that he was busy and that they could call back in an hour. We had pizza one more time before we went home, and that time he had to go into town to get pizza dough before making them. At that time, when asking for a kebab, he said that he couldn't make it for some reason, but a couple of minutes later he suddenly decided that he could. The following morning was also interesting. The man behind the counter was only there in the evenings, so in the morning we had to deal with the cleaning lady or whoever she was. If the guy behind the counter in the evenings was Basil, then this woman was without a doubt Manuel. She barely spoke neither Swedish nor English, but she was eager to help.

After breakfast we got on a train towards Narvik in Norway. It is a nice train ride for a couple of hours with great scenery. We got seats in a panorama restaurant wagon and had our cameras going the whole way. At first it was cloudy, but as we passed the border to Norway the weather got better, and the fjords were very beautiful. After some walking around in Narvik we got on the train and headed back, and this time we met a couple of New Zeelanders. One of them had been working as an English teacher in Japan and could speak some Japanese.

The next day we went out with dog-sledges. The temperature was a freezing -30°C and the landscape we traveled through was beautiful. When we got back in the evening we even got to see Northern Lights (Aurora). Did you know that when Northern Lights appear, they appear exactly the same on the other side of the globe as Southern Lights? However, since they can only be seen at night these "reflections" are invisible to the human eye. Anyway, it was the first encounter with Northern Lights for both Emma and me and we were so happy that we danced with each other. The cold was another reason for the dance... At night we took a sauna and then went to see The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

The following day we went to a place called Esrange - a research facility where they launch rockets into the sky to do different research, and keep contact with satellites. Apparently the location is perfect for these things, and researchers from all over the world work there. In the evening, before going to the airport we visited the Kiruna church. It is a wooden church built with to look like a Lappish house (lappkåta) - the traditional houses of the Sami people in northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia.

On our way to where we were going to catch a bus to the airport we entered a little gift shop with all kind of art and handcraft from northern Sweden. Unfortunately everything was very expensive, so we didn't buy anything except for some postcards, but there were some things that I had to take photos of - the Sauna Spirits and a Sami goddess. Both of these reminded me very much of the Japanese animated movie Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) which I have recently been working on a translation of. Of course these similarities are probably just coincidences, but I find it interesting. The Sauna Spirits are nothing traditional as far as I can tell, but a funny thing for your sauna - they are made of rocks, and you put them where you usually put the sauna rocks, and then you pour water on them and in their mouths they wheeze as if they where alive.

New Year's Eve was not very exciting - I got a severe cold and walked around like a zombie, but on the bright side I had Emma to take care of me, and that made it a wonderful memory anyway.

I wish you all a Happy New Year!

2003