Ice Sculptures at Scheveningen (Den Haag, Netherlands): 2019-2020 edition!

Last winter, I had written about a Ice Sculpture festival at the beach (Scheveningen) in Den Haag (Netherlands)... that year the theme was SteamPunk. Looking back at the photos, it was a really nice event that I got to visit with my girls and my mother.... I do remember it being quite bitterly cold in the closed off area though....

This year, I had the opportunity to visit with just my two daughters... my wife was working and my mother was not visiting this time. I had remembered it (thanks Google Photos... for the past photo memories...).... and so made plans to go, my wife was pretty busy during this period... and I had a day when I wasn't touring, so it was as nice chance to get the kids out of my wife's hair for a while!

This year's theme was Disney inspired... I'm not sure, but it probably had something to do with the release of a HUGE Disney blockbuster this year... not Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, but the much much better Frozen 2! However, it would be cynical to think that that had anything to do with the choice of the topic... it was probably just an accidental coincidence!

... not Olaf...

To be honest, I much preferred the previous year's theme of the SteamPunk... I think it just had better designs and a wider range of interesting ideas for the sculptures. We also came a bit later in the festival, and so some of the sculptures looked a little less sharp than they probably had been about 3 weeks ago!

Also quite different was the layout of the space... they had the same container volume that was closed off and dropped to -10 Celcius (69474332.0544214 random American heating measure.... ) but instead of a long winding path through the sculptures, they had two open areas that were surrounded by sculptures. To my feeling, it was a much less successful format as it meant that you weren't really focused on a single sculpture at a time... and distracted (at least the kids were,,,) by the the 6 or so sculptures all facing inwards on the open area.

Still, it was a nice thing to have come to see... the lighting is really quite stunning on some of the ice sculptures, it's lucky that we now have LEDs that don't output so much heat in comparison to the light and colour that they produce! I really hope that they change the layout format back to the path-like one... and have a slightly more interesting (for me...) theme! Enjoy the snapshots! See if you can pick up some of the Disney references... although, there was the odd Big Friendly Giant...