Yup… We get so bored we build a big building out of ice every year. I grew up with this, so it’s normal to me. ButI was thinkin… It’ll be odd trying to get others to understand this.
Anyway… Truly MPSIMS.
Grr… I should preview before posting. “THINKING” and add a few spaces in there where they belong.
St. Paul, MN does it too. I wonder what other places do Ice Palaces?
hey, i come from a town of 10,000 inhabitants with 12 churches
( 1 Methodist
2 Presbyterian
1 Free Presbyterian
1 Catholic
1 Baptist
1 Church of Ireland (episcopalian)
1 Elim Pentecostal
1 Plymouth Brethren
1 Gospel Hall
2 Christian Fellowship Church house groups)
and 15 pubs.
some of which aren’t even owned by paramilitary organisations, and one of which was Estd in 1731.
it’s a fun place on a saturday night.
Sapporo Japan has a really famous ice festival. Harbin China as well. I imagine that any place that gets real cold for a long time has some of the same. There is a bar (hotel?) in Norway (or somewhere in Scandanavia) made completely out of ice every year…
Houghton, MI does one.
Ice castles are nothing. What people WON’T believe is stuff like outhouse races.
The Carnaval de Quebec, in Quebec City builds a big ice palace too.
Now that I think of it, my Cegep (college) built one a couple of years ago…not all that big, but big enough, in a parkinglot at school. I guess places with long winters are more likely to do it than others…I think it would be kind of unimaginable in a place like Hamilton, since there’s NEVER enough snow here, and it would just look stupid surrounded by mud.
We have “bed races” and frying pan tosses. Sadly they’re both very popular events.
Feh. Sixth EVER? Quite a claim for a little town that knows nothing of the fine art of racing an outdoor bathroom. Bask in all our outhouse race glory! We take this thing pretty seriously.
I don’t know how many years it’s been since we’ve raced outhouses, but I’m twenty, and I remember not being ablt to ride in the outhouse one year because I was too young. If you read the rules, the minimjm age is thirteen. Also, I remember the races happening BEFORE that year, so they are at least ten years old, if not closer to fifteen or twenty.
Might I also add that their interpretation of what an outhouse is is rather glib. I mean, are there no standards by which to follow? One team could easily build an outhouse that has a distinct advantage with such hilly-nilly rules as those!
There’s the big parade in the town (Saranac Lake, NY) this Saturday, if anyone’s interested in stopping in. My place is open.
Oh, and btw, it is not just some town parade… its more of a whole day party for the whole town, worth going a few hours to see if you’ve got nothing to do for the day.
Mardi Gras theme. (note to self… stock up on beads 
j/k)
Oh, Clayton, you’re just suffering from PMS.
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Yeah, well none of ya got the HöstFest.
The rootinest, tootinest collection of geriatrics in the world every October.
Tripler
Try the Lutefisk. I hear it’s terrific.
Actually, Houghton doesn’t really do any sort of Ice Castle - although one might show up year to year.
Houghton has Michigan Tech’s Winter Carnival , where all the Greek organizations build big-ass snow statues every year for a month or so, then finish them up during a crazy all-night binge on Wednesday night. There have been castles in the past, but the statues take a lot of different forms.
It’s a pretty big event - the all nighter is pretty busy, full of people walking around, drinking (stealthily) all night. All the hotel rooms in town are booked solid way in advance, lots of tourists, a few days off of school, etc. It’s pretty interesting.
There actually was a snow house built last year, and they’re working on another one for this year but those are new additions and aren’t all that exciting.
I bet that’s why there’s no Camelot today.
I don’t believe it.
The tradition of Ice Palaces goes back a long time. It was even a major plot point in my favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald short story.
BTW, when I went to college, nobody would believe that my hometown was Hicksville, as in the honest to gods name of the joint, rather than an apt description, which it is as well.
That is the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi in Northern Sweden. This year they have also erected a replica in ice of the Globe Theatre and play Hamlet in Sami.
I sort of liked that URL: http://www.hostfest.com/ as hostfest is a totally sensible Swedish word (although I have never seen it before) meaning coughing party.