TARGET 130109
THE FREIBOURG ICE PALACE
Approaching the moat
There are a lot of ice festivals, where different teams make elaborate ice carvings and compete for local championships, but it is very rare for a single person to create one of his own and open his creation to the public.
But in Freibourg, Switzerland, Karl Neuhaus (pronounced, "Noy-haus"), a talented ice sculptor, annually builds his own palace and palace grounds out of ice. Fast becoming one of the favorate tourist spots for Swiss and foreign visitors alike, the Ice Palace is in its 23rd year of being open to the public.
Just like some people go to great lengths to decorate their homes with thousands of lights (and hundreds of hours of labor), Neuhaus annually puts a tremendous amount of time and labor into building a fantasyland of ice sculptures.
Crossing the moat
The palace gate
The cold climate in the Freibourg area can only sustain this frozen masterpiece for around three months, from Christmas until early March. Then, like a frozen Mandela, it returns to nature to be seen no more. Next year, another palace, with another design will appear in its place to please the senses and fantasies of another round of children, both young ones and old.
The palace grounds
Looking more like a place where Ice Hobbits would live, the "buildings" and "homes" are carefully designed to create a small, protected village inside the palace grounds. To realize the size of the sculptures (and the work it took to build them), the person you see in the above picture is not an ice sculpture, but an adult tourist, only visiting the palace.
The Christmas tree
And the manger scene
The Palace inhabitants also observe the Christmas season, so naturally there is both a Christmas tree and a Manger.
Where the people live
There are structures of icecicles that hang in an arch rather than straight down, and houses you can enter, and ice trees of all different shapes. The work and artistry it takes to build these structures can really only be appreciated by visiting them.
And what would an old palace grounds be like without th obligatory wild and scary woods?
And penguins? But of course!! Switzerland gets the latest childrens' Christmas stories on TV, too.
Watch the following video for a walkthrough of the grounds, provided by the creator, Karl Neuhaus (who only speaks German, but the warmth of his friendliness is clear).
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pictures and videos can be found at the following web sites:
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The photographs shown here are from
Chinanews via People.com.Ch
David and Sarah’s Adventures Flickr set and
DamnFreshPics.blogspot.com