At the end of January we had our first Overnight field trip in the local forest Jegersberg nearby our University and spend our first night outside in Norway together with the whole course but seperated into different tent groups. All the different Nationalities representing in our Outdoor Euducation class were supposed to prepare some typical team-building games for the programme during the afternoon to get closer in contact with our fellow students. It was also intended as an introduction in using and testing our outdoor equipment.

Our meeting point was an open field close to a lake and the woods in Jegersberg. After some general information from our teacher Len, we started setting up our tents in 5 different tent groups. Therefore, we had to find our own perfect spot in the woods. Directly after that, we started with the team dynamics games on the open grass field, which was half frozen, so we had to be careful. We played many different and in particular funny games from the origin of the USA, England, Switzerland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Czech Republic and from Germany, representing with eight students the mayority of the class. It was a mixtue of classic games of hide-and-seek, catching games or just team games like the human knot, where you have to work together as a team to untangle the human knot without letting go of hands. My team Germany prepared besides the human knot also three other typical team-building games such as a catching game, where you had to protect your teammates in a circle from being caught by the catcher.

In the evening we had an other competetion, in which we got a few limited ingredients for the different tent groups from Len to prepare a meal in only 15 minutes. My “German” tent group consisting of Moritz, Jochen, Katja and me got some potatoes and fish so that we cooked a fish soup with adding some spices.

After we had our self-organised dinner, we started a campfire and let it burning for a long, although it started snowing at the beginning of the night. Some of us went back to a supermarket to buy some marshmallows and biscuits so that we could eat a couple of snores around the warm fire.

My first night outside in Norway was quite good, but I woke up a couple of times during the night, beacuse one of my groupmembers was snoring the whole nights. That’s why I was tired the next morning, when we had to build down our with snow covered tent to be ready for lectures at the University.

All in all, I enjoyed the night outside in Jegersberg with my Outdoor Education class and it was a lot of fun during the program with many differnt team-building games as icebreakers for the class. At night, the campfire was a nice place to gather around and learn more about each other of the class.