This Is What It's Like To Stay At The ICEHOTEL, Sweden - Hand Luggage Only

Fancy having a look around the ICEHOTEL? Chance are if you’re already on here, you do so let me show you around! 😉😁

On our second day at the ICEHOTEL (after our epic dinner at the Chef’s table the night before), we finally got to check out the rooms at the ICEHOTEL.

At this point, the seasonal ICEHOTEL (ICEHOTEL 29; with 29 being for the 29^th year of the ICEHOTEL running) hadn’t opened yet but the ICEHOTEL 365.

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It’s the one open all year round was open and so off we went to check out the rooms.

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I could start to try to do describe each of them and tell you who the artists are but my guess is that you’d rather see them than have me babbling on about them so here they are.

Each room has a different design, heralded by a sign outside the room telling you who the artists are and the name of the art!

My favourite has to be this one with the stairs though!

Like each of them constantly elicits a “WOW!” from you when you walk in but this one probably had the biggest “WOW!” from me. 😄

There are labyrinths, books, jellyfish, libraries and so much more!

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Suffice to say, you can easily pass a fair bit of time just wandering through the different rooms and letting your imagination run wild in this amazing Winter Wonderland…

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…which is exactly what we did till we realised we were running late for an activity we’d scheduled for lunch – Arctic Sushi Atelier.

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With that, we hot-footed it to the Veranda restaurant where we’d had dinner the night before, to partake in a sushi-making masterclass.

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Fishing is a pretty big deal up here in Lapland (the ICEHOTEL is right next to a huge river and is actually built using the river) and anywhere there’s good fish and, obviously, a great chef; there’s good sushi!

Thankfully, the ICEHOTEL has both.

For the longest time, I’d always been apprehensive of making sushi. It just always looked so tricky and I just figured my skills were better suited to eating, rather than making it.

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Starting the afternoon with champagne soon alleviated (some of) that and off we went to make ourselves sushi.

Well, I say, ‘we’ but the chef actually took the first leg – showing us everything we need to know, educating us on the history of sushi (there’s so much about it that I didn’t even know I didn’t even 😄), and showing up what key mistakes to avoid when making sushi.

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After probably thousands of hours of experience making sushi, suffice to say, he was more than qualified for the job and with a seemingly effortless skill (you know, the kind that makes you feel like you too could do exactly that), he set about making a beautiful platter of all sorts of sushi.

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And then it was our turn, and like everything else, we turned it into a competition to see who was the best sushi maker!

I personally think I won but if you ask Lloyd he’ll say it was him; I got more praise from the chef so make of that what you will. 😁 😁😁

The best part about making the sushi, of course, was getting to eat it and although we arrived fairly still full from lunch, by the time our sushi was ready.

It was wolfed down with great gusto!

Lloyd couldn’t stop raving about it and I totally get why. Making fresh sushi with your own hands has gotta be one of the best ways to have sushi.

Clearly, having a great chef on hand help you do this too helps a lot but I’m gonna take the credit for my own creations here. Ha! 😆

Now, you might remember that I said the ICEHOTEL 29 wasn’t quite ready earlier in the day? Well turns out it was and upon realising this, we headed off to go check it out before our evening’s activity (spoiler alert – it involved the Northern Lights 😉 ).

Entering the ICEHOTEL 29 (which is a totally different building from the ICEHOTEL365), we explored the art suites in fairly sporadic order, starting with ‘Icewoman’…

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…moving onto what is the ‘regular’ ice rooms (different from the ice suites as the regular ice rooms all have the same design)

…and then onto ‘Differential Expansion’.

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‘The Living Ocean’ was one of my favourites, with a shark swimming within the walls and a whale right on the roof! It’s actually quite brilliant in person. Even more so than you can see in a photo.

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The main hallway is also pretty impressive!

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We carried on to the ‘Oak’ room, another impressive one with acorns doubling up as room lights.

‘The Tao Of Cat’…

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… and another favourite of mine ‘Spruce Woods’, complete with a campervan and ‘fireplace’.

‘Dancing Auroras’ was another beautiful gem…

…as was ‘The Sea Of Ice’

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and ‘Haven’.

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Funnily enough, we only popped in to have a quick look but wandering around, we very quickly lost track of time!

(*The irony of it was that, although we didn’t even realise it at the time, there was still a whole hall with another series of rooms.

Which, it turns out, was where our room the next day would be in; that we missed ours entirely. We had no clue there was even another hall here at the time.)

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Leaving ICEHOTEL 29, we made a pit stop at ICEHOTEL 365 before heading to the warm rooms to rid ourselves of the chill in our fingers (from wearing inappropriate gloves) to check out some of the rooms that hadn’t been opened earlier in the day.

The main one being this one below with the library!

It’s just so impressive how all of this has essentially been made from (when it comes down to it) water.

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You just leaving feel so impressed and a tad inspired, to be honest.

And with that, seeing as our evening’s expedition wasn’t for another few hours, we headed back to the warm cabins to kick back, relax and warm up with piping hot lingonberry juice.

All whist being super excited for our adrenaline-fuelled evening’s action!