Ice Palace
Jan. 25th, 2004 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
puzzle_meSo, what is considered fun in Minnesota during the winter? Evidently trudging out in the cold to attend the St Paul Winter Carnival. It's Minnesota's answer to Mardi Gras -- except there's sub-zero weather, no beads, and no women taking their shirts off. In a normal winter, I go and look at the ice sculptures for an hour or two and then retreat to a coffee shop to get hot chocolate and warm up. This year, however, for the first time since 1992, they built an ice palace! I've wanted to go to an ice palace ever since I read the F. Scott Fitzgerald story, "Ice Palace" soon after I had moved to Minnesota. At the time, they weren't planning to build any more due to cost costraints (it's evidently not particularly cheap to insure infrastructure that could, potentially, melt). However, enter the NHL All Star game, taking place at the acclaimed XCel Center in downtown St. Paul, and all of a sudden they were able to come up with funds. I wasn't sure Rogers would be game to tromp out into the cold and shell out $5/person for a button/ticket to go, but since he'd missed out on all of the ice palaces of his youth he was almost as enthusiastic as me about going.
We bought our buttons at Cub Foods before we went downtown, which we were really happy about once we got downtown and saw the line to buy them at the entrance to the palace. It took us an hour or so to actually get off the freeway and into downtown St. Paul at 8ish on a Saturday. And here we thought we'd miss a lot of the crowds by going at night. We parked a ways a way and took a bus to a few blocks away. We walked past people carving 10 foot tall snow sculptures, but bypassed Rice park where the ice sculptures are because it was wall to wall people. Once we got to the ice sculpture, it took us a little while to find the right line, but once we did it moved pretty quickly and they were doing a light show inside the palace while we were waiting so we watched it light up all sorts of pretty colors. I was a little bit disappointed that you couldn't actually go inside any of the turrets or such, but it was still beautifully lit up. (There's a webcam of this year's palace here which I'd recommend looking at after dark). Inside the palace gates they also had an ice rink, a stage where people could do live performances, and some big ice thrones. I'm really glad we went. But, if there's an ice palace in my future tenure in this frozen state, I'll probably opt to go look at it from outside, since it's pretty impressive even from the outside.
We bought our buttons at Cub Foods before we went downtown, which we were really happy about once we got downtown and saw the line to buy them at the entrance to the palace. It took us an hour or so to actually get off the freeway and into downtown St. Paul at 8ish on a Saturday. And here we thought we'd miss a lot of the crowds by going at night. We parked a ways a way and took a bus to a few blocks away. We walked past people carving 10 foot tall snow sculptures, but bypassed Rice park where the ice sculptures are because it was wall to wall people. Once we got to the ice sculpture, it took us a little while to find the right line, but once we did it moved pretty quickly and they were doing a light show inside the palace while we were waiting so we watched it light up all sorts of pretty colors. I was a little bit disappointed that you couldn't actually go inside any of the turrets or such, but it was still beautifully lit up. (There's a webcam of this year's palace here which I'd recommend looking at after dark). Inside the palace gates they also had an ice rink, a stage where people could do live performances, and some big ice thrones. I'm really glad we went. But, if there's an ice palace in my future tenure in this frozen state, I'll probably opt to go look at it from outside, since it's pretty impressive even from the outside.
