Absolut Fun

A few years ago, one of my favorite shows -- The Amazing Race -- stopped in Sweden at a hotel north of the Arctic Circle. The Ice Hotel is built each fall with slabs of ice cut from a nearby river and it offers a bed made of a slab of ice topped with a reindeer blanket. Guests, who usually visit for one night only, sleep in arctic-style sleeping bags. The entire hotel is made of ice, and it stays open all winter until sometime around April when the building begins to leak.

In the intervening years, Absolut has opened several Ice Bars in cities, including Stockholm and Copenhagen and London. Carving the ice from the same river, they ship the slabs in and line the walls of the bar with ice. But everything is ice, including the bar and the glasses. The Stockholm Ice Bar is at the Nordic Hotel. As you enter, they drape a heavy parka over your head with gloves attached. You get an Absolut, usually mixed with a juice so you can see the drink, and people mill about for as long as the one drink takes.

Silly fun to go out of the way for one vodka. But it was tremendous fun, and I would certainly go again.