hey, hey! or hej, hej! if you're Swedish. so these are pictures of our trip up north to the Icehotel in Jukkasjarvi, Sweden. and that's not how you really spell the town name, but my American computer can't be bothered to have a key with the A and two little dots above it. anyway, we went there and stayed the night on December 30, 2002. it was -27 celsius (-17 farenheit, which in turn translates to 49 degrees below freezing) that night, and that made the -5 inside the hotel seem really warm. convincing myself to get up to go to the bathroom at 4 a.m. was quite a chore. it is a 16 hour train ride from Uppsala to Kiruna and then about a half an hour on a bus to Jukkasjarvi, and there is about three hours of daylight, and might i remind you, daylight DOESN'T mean sunlight, it only means that is light out. it is 200km (120 miles) north of the Arctic Circle and REALLY COLD. we only saw some vague white Northern Lights while we were there, that was disappointing, but the area we were in was too lit to see the sky properly. and like any other amazing sight, there is NO WAY to take pictures that actually illustrate how amazing this place really is. hope you enjoy them, but know that you should really go see it for yourself...