This weekend trip was more of a culturally based trip rather than one based upon an activity/expedition. This was good as it allowed for us to visit Oslo and to gain a feeling of what Norwegians at a festival. This trip was intended for us to visit and experience the ski festival Holmenkollen, which is help in Oslo every year. During the festival there are competitions held in both male and female cross country skiing and ski jumping. Also as we were in Norway we took the chance to visit some of the museums to learn more about Norway’s history.  

When we first arrived we went to visit the Viking ship museum which was very interesting to see the ships they used and also how well preserved they were. After this we travelled up to Holmenkollen, when we arrived I did not expect to see so many people camping in the woods and around the track, there were groups of people from all over Norway and also groups from organisations such as the scouts. As there was no events when we arrived we set up camp and had a fire. This gave us the chance to experience how Norwegians celebrate a ski festival, this involved music and parties at night and then the whole next day watching the ski event. I did not appreciate just how big an event this was, until there were hundreds of people there were hundreds of people lining the tracks and getting ready to watch the events that day. As we had tickets we went to watch the races in the stadium, the first event was the cross country ski and it was interesting to see how many skiers some countries had in the race such as Norway, compared to Britain which only had one. As we were watching there people from many different countries watching the races however they were predominantly Norwegian, however this changed when we were watching the ski jumping when the supporters were predominantly from Poland.

The second day was much emptier and many people had left the night before, this was due to the weather and also, as we were told by a few Norwegians, because it was the women’s events. This we spent the day in Oslo visiting the museums, we visited he Kon Tiki, Fram and maritime museum. These were very interesting as we learnt all about some of Norway’s greater explorers and heroes. The kon tiki and fram were particularly interesting as it was good to see the contrast in the equipment there were using for these extreme conditions compared to what we use now to carry out the same activities such as the skis and clothing they wore. Furthermore in the fram museum there is a machine which gives you an idea of what it is like to pull a fully loaded sled, using this machine demonstrated how difficult it is to pull one of these sledges and gave me a greater appreciation of how difficulty expeditions undertaken by Amundsen and Scott and also showed why Scott failed his finale expedition.

Overall this was a very fun weekend experiencing a Norwegian ski festival and watching the competitions, it was also good to get the chance to see the museums and learn more about people like Amundsen who we had looked at in lecture, and although we did not gain any insight about groups and leadership etc I still believe this was a very beneficial trip as it was interesting to meet so many people from all over Norway and to see how they support their country and celebrate an event like this, however it was odd that a lot of people were more interested in watching the men’s events then the women’s, it was also odd that when watching the ski jump that compared to Polish supporters there were relatively few Norwegians in the crowd.