From north Sweden to the south

Kiruna's church

That’s it, we leave Kiruna. We spend there a week, a very interesting week indeed, as I did not expected, to be honest. We visited a mine, the iron mine that actually created the city. A young girl was the guide of our group there and I was impressed by the deep involvement she seemed to feel towards the mining society and its history, problems and evolution. She looked so young and fragile before wearing the professional helmet and uniform, a frail fair girl like a bimbo, and so very serious after starting speaking, so impressive whenever she put herself in front of the huge machines and explained how they used them.

Another girl, other kind of speaking and appearance, was our guide in the Ice hotel when we went to Jukkasjärvi.  Machines again she showed us, machines cutting the ice from the Torne River and then preserving it through the summer in a tent, but also she told us the history of the place, that was without winter occupation before the idea of Ice hotel, and they should have been desperate for years, if we believe her. She had such a passion when she was relating the whole story. She was very young as well, but fat and plump with her rosy face, rosy cheeks,  shoes and nose, even voice. Nevertheless she moved us, speaking slowly and convincingly, so involved as well to the great achievement of her small town, the producing of ice for tourism and fancy. She made us pass some seconds in the 3 sample rooms of the hotel they conserve under the big tent, and we had to admit that the ice hotel it’s a real ice hotel, not only by name.

Imagine that, a city growing in the almost wild north in the beginning of the century because of the iron. A big ‘iron body’ as they name it, that runs for kilometres underground, and obliges the men to search deeper and deeper to satisfy the great need of the world for iron. A whole city emerges in the fringes of the mountain that sinks where the iron is excavated. And 10 decades later, so close to it, another factory starts producing something out of nothing: ice! Just by digging deeply (again) in the frozen water of the Torne River. And this time is about fancy, is about the human need for wonder and magic, is something absolutely temporary, destined to melt down in some months, the opposite of iron and steel.

Ice candelabra in the ice hotel

Both girls guided us to factories that use the material of the earth, iron or ice, just taking it from where it lays. That is Sweden, a long country that is not a country really, is just a piece of the planet. The train to Kiruna goes and goes and goes, and you can see nothing else that woods, trees, lakes, mountains, as if men have not passed yet to this place. It is summer and you cannot understand why all those woods and lakes have not attired people, but you must think of winter, when living really needs a great consumption of energy. To live here in winter must not be so easy.

But I would like to come back in winter. The family we met in Kiruna got a sledge and 3 dogs to pull it, and they invited us to try. We have to do it.