Having run out of cultural options since museums are closed for the New Year's holidays, I decided to behave like an ordinary tourist.
Mingling with the rest of the partying flock, I joined the queue to go into Stockholm's Icebar, originally opened in June 2002 and renamed a few years ago Absolut Icebar.
The Icebar concept was created by the founders of the Jukkasjärvi-based Icehotel.
The latter was actually started after a snow building, a sort of igloo, was created for the Swedish Armed Forces that used it as the perfect location for its winter survival courses.
The Artic Hall, a 250 m2 igloo was later built in 1992 and used for an art show.
Little by little, the idea of a building where people could drink, sleep and visit art exhibitions turned into a fully-fledged business concept and, in the mid-90s, the Artic Hall became the Icehotel.
Further art and music projects were launched and the hotel expanded to welcome more guests, while in 1996-97 Herb Ritts shot in Jukkasjärvi the Absolut Versace campaign, launched in Vogue on 1 April 1997, with Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Markus Schenkenberg.
As the years passed, the small ice bar made from Torne River ice that the Icehotel founders had opened in 1993 was exported to other cities under the collaboration with the Absolut Company.
All the bars are based around specific themes: London's looks like an industrial space with ice cogs and a conveyor belt with flouorescent vodka cocktails, for example, and this concept was recently reused to refurbish and recreate the environment of Stockholm's Absolut Icebar.
Now, having battled temperatures such as -8°C, thinking of entering into a place that has got a stable temperature of -5°C (and no freezing snow constantly falling on yourself) was almost reassuring.
So reassuring in fact that when the girl at the entrance came towards to me with a massive plasticky cape with a fur hedged hood and incorporated gloves, I almost sniggered and made my “by now that's useless, I'm already suffering from hypothermia; can I borrow that to go into the street rather than into the bar?”-face.
Complaining about the Bibendum-goes-Batman capes is against regulations, so I hoped that at least what was inside wouldn't have disappointed me. Instead it did.
Most of the inspirations for the current set of the bar were lifted from London's, so you had industrial cogs scattered here and there or cog-shaped armchairs (just two), with the entire bar immersed in artificial Aurora Borealis lights.
I'm not sure what I was expecting to find, but surely more than just a bunch of grown up tourists taking pictures of themselves licking their ice glasses or pretending they were enjoying the fake atmosphere.
The thing is after drinking your (vodka) cocktail and taking a few pics there isn't much to do since, after a while, the low temperature, bad music mix and a reduced entertainment factor, convinces you it's better to go back outside in the cold than stay inside in the ice bar.
I cannot deny I had a poetical epyphany, though, when I discovered a little twig frozen in one of the ice cubes that formed the walls.
If the story is true, the twig must belong to the Torne since the ice used for these bars usually comes from this river that has been freely flowing through Swedish Lapland for roughly 8,000 years now.
I guess the twig was the cutest thing I saw in the bar; it seemed to be spying upon us, a bunch of silly tourists clad in our lunar capes, almost telling us “I'm more fragile and delicate than you, but I seem to resist in this cold much better”.
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