Hot New Year Tub

Holy heavens - it takes a painful while of arguing with your "innerer Schweinehund" (german, lit. = inner swine-dog) until you finally scrape up enough courage somewhere from the walls of the inner caves of your soul and undress at windy minus 5 celsius. But once you are inside this cozy hot tub, with 10 others and several liters of cold beer it takes even more to get out again!

This is actually what I do for New Years Eve far out of Tromso in the middle of nowhere with my brother, his girlfriend and a couple of husky-mushers. The water in the tub has cozy 40 degrees celsius and is fired by a small wood-burner inside the tub... ahhhhhhhhhh!
From inside the tub we are able to enjoy magnificent fireworks on the hills surrounding the Tromso-Fjord. From their boats, fishermen fire expired emergency amunition into the air - little rockets that unfold mini-parachutes once they are airborne. The bright red lights are hanging in the sky for a very long time like a whole galaxy of dying stars... fantastic!

In the end we spend 4 (four!) hours inside this massive wooden tub simply because we can't imagine exposing our wet skins again to the icy wind while running a 100 meters through the snow to our warm tent. As a result, our skin is so rinkled that we resemble a flock of alligators when we finally manage to get out of the water and stand around the open fire to warm up.