03 December 2014
I had a fantastically freezing Thanksgiving in Lapland, Sweden. See below a map of the two cities I visited. Kiruna is the blue star, and Abisko is the red star. We started on Wednesday, November 26 with an 18 hour drive going north! We arrived in Kiruna in the morning on Thursday (Thanksgiving), ready for a day of adventure. We started our Lapland adventure with a tour of Kiruna. Fun fact: the most beautiful church in Sweden is in Kiruna! See it below. Also, the town is completely supported by the iron ore mine which is worked on 24 hours per day.
On Thanksgiving afternoon, we had the opportunity to go on a snow-mobile and dogsled combo tour. It was such an amazing experience. Thank gosh they gave us giant parkas because it was so cold! I had never rode on either of those types of transportation before, so it was a blast! In between snow mobiles and dog sleds, we all huddled in a warm tent around a fire and drank tea and ate kanelbulle. I also felt obligated to go to each and every dog and give him/her a pet to thank them for the lovely ride :)
I know you’re all wondering what I ate for Thanksgiving dinner. Hate to let you down, but I had a peperoni pizza at a pizzeria in Kiruna. Buying whole turkeys are absolutely not common in Sweden.
The next day, we started our adventure to Abisko wayyyyyyyyy up north! On the way, we stopped at the famous Ice Hotel. One of the employees gave us a tour and told us a bunch of information about how the ice hotel is built. Here’s what I remember. It is built out of ice blocks and snice (a mixture of snow and ice). The ice blocks come from the Torne River which runs right behind the hotel. They take the ice from the river in large blocks every March when the ice is at its thickest. They keep the ice in a giant freezer all summer and fall until they are ready to start building in early November. The ice hotel is rebuilt EVERY YEAR! Wow, that is so much work. To stay in the hotel is not as expensive as you would think. The cheapest room costs about 2500 Swedish Kronor for one night. That’s approximately 330 US Dollars. You sleep on a normal bed in a room. The bed has a reindeer skin/fur on it, and you sleep inside one of those super intense ice camping sleeping bags. People say it’s the best night of sleep they’ve ever had! Crazy goons. Here you can see the front door of the ice hotel and the inside hallway!
After the Ice Hotel, we went to visit a Sami Family and their reindeer. Sami are the native people to the Scandinavian countries. They live in the north of Sweden, Norway, and Finland. They have their own language, culture, customs, and daily norms. You can compare them to the Native Americans. They follow the reindeer around and live off of them. They use their meat (Yes, I did try eating reindeer meat. It is quite salty.), skin/fur, and antlers. The reindeer actually drop their antlers every single year, so it is quite common to use the antlers to make knives and other utensils. So, we had the opportunity to chill out with a couple Sami in a tent with a fire. The sami woman sang for us and we ate reindeer and crackers and also some sort of reindeer broth. I wasn’t a fan of either, really, but it was a good experience haha. When outside, we got to feed the reindeer! They were quite young reindeer and not tame. They were afraid of us, so most of us left the food on the ground and watched them eat it.
Then we arrived in Abisko! We had a fun campfire with s’mores and banana boats. The next day we drove to Narvik, Norway. Narvik itself wasn’t AMAZING, but the drive there was like nothing I’d ever seen. I thought that the mountains in California were gorgeous, but they are nothing compared to this! Here’s a few pictures to show you :) At one point, we passed about 10 HUGE windmills. I love the interaction of technology with nature. It is beautiful and seamless. I also took a cool panorama of Narvik the city from the top of a hotel. Enjoy!
That night we had an amazing sauna session down by the lake in Abisko. A sauna session that only a few people in the world have experienced. I watched the northern lights in a bikini in the snow from right next to the lake. Un-be-liev-able. Christian, my friend from Switzerland/KTH took this beautiful picture of the northern lights. SO COOl! By the way, the northern lights actually look grey to the eye. They look like bright lights in the sky from a beam or something. They come out of no where. But the camera picks up UV rays that we can’t see with the naked eye.
The last day we cleaned up our cabins, went for a beautiful hike in the sun, and hopped back on the bus for a 20 hour bus ride home to Stockholm. The hike was really fun. It was about 4-5 km up the hill behind the hostel and along the river. At one point some of the friends were worried that we were on the wrong path, but with a good gps and an average map, we let them know that in fact, we were doing just fine :) Overall, the lapland trip was the best. It was so worth the cold and the crazy amount of travel. I hope to be able to go back up to Lapland someday, and maybe visit the Lapland in Finland as well. I hope you all had an amazing Thanksgiving at home. I have less than 3 weeks left in Sweden, and I’m going to live it up to the fullest. Bring on the Christmas markets, Lucia buns, and candlelight. Jag älskar dig.
PS: These are the amazing women I became friends with on the trip! From left to right we have Toni from Austria, Zsófi from Hungary, Eliane from France, Marine from France, Me!, and Renate from The Netherlands. PPS: I forgot to mention the temperature. The coldest temperature we experienced on the trip was -13 degrees celsius which is 9 degrees fahrenheit. Pretty damn cold. Also, Kiruna and Abisko are above the Arctic Circle.
