Illustration by Jeffrey DeCoster

You're having: A three-dollar shot of surprisingly smooth house-made vodka

A couple dozen years ago, carpenters working at England's Faraday atmospheric research station on Galindez Island in Antarctica received a shipment of wood. The station had been around since the 1950s, had done good scientific work, had been the first place in the world where men noticed the widening hole in the earth's ozone layer. But the station was getting rough around the edges. It needed work. The carpenters were supposed to fashion the fresh wood into a new pier to replace the rickety old one. They didn't. Instead, in a move that got them temporarily reprimanded but eternally toasted, they used it to build the Antarctic Peninsula's only bar. In aesthetics and atmosphere, the bar initially strove to duplicate a typical English tavern, but due to a real estate transaction that took place about a decade ago, it eventually became a rarer beast. As the station's now mostly Cyrillic Web site explains: "In 1996 the British base Faraday has been transferred to Ukraine and renamed to Vernadsky.... Twelve peoples are wintering in the First Ukrainian Antarctic Expedition."

Which means that today the bar is a palimpsest: a Ukrainian joint scrawled on top of a British pub. And since Antarctica is a stateless continent, belonging to no country at all, you have as much right to claim one of its high-backed stools as anyone. You drink homemade vodka under wilted photos of English explorers. You tap your feet to Russian pop while leafing through old football mags. You look outside. You laugh at the penguins there. You avoid the imported Ukrainian wine. You're visiting in the summertime, but wish you could be here in the winter, if only for one dark day, when things are at their coldest and most miserable, and this odd, golden retreat must be just about the coziest and strangest spot on the planet.

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