Mumblings about frozen toes and artic life

A trip up north

Like any good journey it began with 17hour train ride (seated, not one of those nice sleeper things, oh no) that was delayed by 1.5hours. So 18.5 hours later, after spending most of the night like a Chinese contortionist we arrived slightly bruised and most definitely deranged. But it was worth it! Here we were caught in –25 degree winds, ready to breathe in the artic air.

But we didn’t get much because a) it was cold enough to frost our lungs over and b) we quickly sought refuge 2km underground in a mine shaft.

It was here that we were blest with a 3 hour tour (ya gilligan’s island much) by a woman
who had been stuck down there for far too many years and was going gradually insane.
Not mention she had the most ear-piercing mechanical voice we’d ever heard AND… she yelled at us :0 Needless to say we wondered if we’d make it out alive. They say about this about the Swedish language:

“Every Finnish sentence starts in falsetto and ends in baritone. Norwegian sounds like Finnish intoned backwards but it’s actually a Swedish dialect. The Danes with their diphthongs and glottal stops sound as if they are caught between swallowing and spitting out a very hot potato. Only the Swedish language has evolved from grunted Icelandic gobbledygook to become the familiar sing-song sounds that slosh about in your ear.”

There was no sing-song slosh in her voice – let me tell you!

Anyways, we had survived and we even had fun (as evidenced by the ludicrous photos below) and then it was off to the middle of nowhere in our 9 seater soccer mom van.

This middle of nowhere happened to be Abisko, a tiny town in the woods in the artic circle – where we managed to get a very brief and blurring glimpse of the northern lights.

Next day, we randomly drove to Norway – why not!? Saw some reindeer along the way, took some nice photos – it was basically the sea to sky highway covered in snow, I’m not gonna lie. Why Norwegians bother to come to Whistler I have no idea, its exactly like Norway only warmer and less expensive (ok I guess I have some sort of idea).

You must look up Narvik on a map because it is ridiculously far north – I’m talking Santa Clause’s factory here.

Then back to Kiruna. I’ll recap this in point form to save you time: Alex almost killed me with his crazy snow mobile driving, we went for a dog sled excursion, we saw the ice hotel, we admired the ice hotel, we took pictures of the ice hotel, we worshiped the ice hotel…

Then we stayed in the coziest, cutest, quintessential Swedish hotel for the night and sadly returned our soccer mom van (tear) and went back to a significantly warmer Uppsala.