The ice carving

Hi friends,

This weekend, I was in Brugge with my husband, my children and their grandparents. We went for a walk on the Christmas market, we warmed ourselves around a good mulled wine and then we took advantage that there were not many tourists to take a boat trip on the famous canals Brugge, nicknamed the Venice of the North.

After this beautiful day, we were to see the ice carvings that were exposed in a marquee where the ambient temperature was -6 ° C. It's okay, I did not get too cold, even when I took a ride with the children on an ice slide in a giant igloo. We were not wet, indeed, it was so cold that the ice did not melt and so it did not get wet. At the end of the visit, I just started to feel my hands numb because to take beautiful pictures, I had to take off my gloves during the whole visit.

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These ice sculptures are exhibited each year with a different theme each time. It was one of my dreams, to see ice carvings (the only one I had seen before was in the endless day movie where Bill Murray sculpts Andy MacDowell's face to try to impress him) .

This year, a stroke of luck for kids and for us, too, was Disney's theme for the 25th Anniversary of Disneyland. All our favorite characters were there Alice, cars, super heroes, indestructible, Sleeping Beauty, Woody, Lightning Buzz, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Mickey, ...

These sculptures can quickly melt or hold, even months depending on the temperature of the room where they are.

Process

Ice carving involves shaping the ice, first with a chainsaw or electric sander, and then with smaller tools to complete the details of the carving.

The sculptures are made on blocks of ice. There are several types of ice blocks, they have different stages of purity. They can be completely transparent like glass or whiter. The sculptors use several kinds of ice to give relief and to dress a character for example.

Origin

In the 16th century, fishermen were already using ice to preserve their fish or shellfish. They then started carving blocks of ice to care because they found the weather long and long when they were not fishing.

Then people started using ice cream to keep their meal fresh or to refresh their drink.

A little later, in Russia, ice sculptures began to appear.

In the nineteenth century, the ice-cream trade became an industry whose purpose was the harvesting of ice blocks of natural origin that were sold to traders, industrialists and private individuals.

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