THE LAST POST ABOUT KIRUNA

I want to show you the last thing about Kiruna. I talked in some previous post that it is so difficult to describe our experience there, but Fleur, a French girl that is preparing the Yearbook (book which everyone sends 5 photos and their name, telephone, email and so on) ask me to write something about Kiruna. And this is the text that will appear in the Yearbook in a couple of weeks:

Hej Hej:

Fleur asked me to write something about my trip to Kiruna and I will be delighted to tell you our experiences in Lappland. We began our trip on the morning of the 21st of March and we arrived to Kiruna in the afternoon. We went out of the airport and the first sights were fantastic. Everything was covered in snow, although it was sunny, as it would be for our entire trip. We considered ourselves lucky because we faced a warm -5 degree while other people who went in January had to survive a much less warm -30 degree!!

Our first destination was our hostel, Ripan. We lived in two great cabins with bunk beds and kitchen inside. After that, we had to visit Kiruna’s most famous and important attraction, the ice hotel. We took a bus and we arrived in sight of it 30 minutes later. We were impressed with the exterior. You can imagine how many pictures we took!!! But it was only the beginning. We went in to the ice bar. Drinking a cup of Absolut vodka surrounded by ice walls, chairs and tables is a great experience J. But we had a small problem: we forget that the ice hotel was closing at 18:00 and when we wanted to enter.... it was already 18:30!! It’s always the same problem when you drink, you forget the important things (although we only drank a cup of vodka each person).

Our key goal in this trip was to see northern lights. We failed to see any in the first night and we came back to our cabins really disapointed.

On the second day, we had booked our activities with Henrik Taube, a strange man that earns a lot of money every day but still wears really old clothes. It was wonderful and amazing: dogs sledges, snowmobiles, ice rivers and cabins in the middle of nowhere. We were kilometres and kilometres away from the city and not far from the North Pole. Who would have told us about such an experience one year ago!!!!! We ate reindeer and chicken in the cabin and we drank a strange coffee and some beers. And finally, it was on that night that we saw the Northern Lights!!! I don’t have enough words to describe it. Fantastic, amazing, schocking and... many more things. We spent at least two hours outside looking at the sky.

We were very happy when we came back to our first hostel the next day. We returned to ice hostel and we visited every suite inside. Artistic pictures were taken there and we spent a lot of time enjoying that place.

But the best surprise was coming. The last night, while we were eating in our cabins (and talking on the phone) aurora borealis or northern lights appeared another time. And that night we saw the best auroras we saw in the trip. There were a lot of green flashes in the sky, and red when they moved from one place to another. It was one of the most wonderful things we have ever seen.

All in all, we came back to Ryd really happy. Before finishing, I have to mention all my friends in that trip: Álvaro, Virginia, Javi, Tito, Borja and Juan. Seven people that will never forget this trip, as it was a great example of our wonderful Erasmus year in Sweden. Although there are more friends who didn’t go to Kiruna. We will go back to our countries, but we will have our friends forever. I will never forget every moment that we lived in Linköping.

SEE YOU!!