Landmark Center clock tower and Winter Carnival Ice Palace in St. Paul, Minnesota

© Joe Mamer Photography/Alam

A midwestern celebration. Embracing the cold

We’re in St. Paul, Minnesota, for day seven of the Winter Carnival - an 11-day celebration of all the fun you can have on the opposite side of the globe. In 1885, a journalist from New York who had visited St. Paul called it ‘another Siberia, unfit for human habitation.’ This news prompted the people of St. Paul to create the Winter Carnival, which debuted in 1886. When the temperature is cold enough, carnival organisers build a massive ice palace, whose ice-block walls frame the Landmark Center clock tower in our photo today.