We went for the Worldcup in Skijumping to Oslo for the weekend. We were camping in the forest with a lot of norwegian people all over the area, went to two museums, related to the national heroes Amundsen and Nansen, watched the Skijump and the Skirace and had awesome weather while doing all that.

After reading an article about, so called, Micro-Adventure, I made the plan to do a small hike into the local area on my own, sleep in a self-build shelter and come back on the next day.

When I left at 12 o`clock there was sunny weather in Kr.sand and I was walking on tracks and cutting across the country with a compass in a nature reservative. Around 17 o`clock I found a nice spot on top of a hill (250 m above sea level), set up my shelter with the tarp I brought with me and started a campfire. Sadly it started to drizzle soon and I slipped into my biwi bag, I tried for the first time. It was colder than expected and quite noisy because of the wind, so my night wasn’t that comfortable. Next morning it was raining a lot but after I had scrambled eggs, I made on the stove my mood was pretty good. I packed my stuff together and went back to my place to have a hot shower.

Article mentioned in the text.

Because this trip is also included in the assignments, I just uploaded the pictures in here. For detailed information, check out the second assingment. Pictures were taken by two of my group members. I left my reflex camera due to weight at home.

The Basketballteam from University invited me and an other international student, called Petr, to the biggest sports competition between Universities in Norway: Around 2400 Students were competing in all kinds of sports. So we could see already a lot of students with big bags, while Petr and me were sitting for 13 hours in the train from Kr.Sand to Trondheim (approximately 850 km).

When we arrived we met the other members of our team, who took the plane. We were 7 players. The acommodation was provided in a local school, were we slept with some other students in different classrooms. We had altogether 5 games and at the end we made the 3rd place. Between and after the games we had a look around in Trondheim or had dinner with the rest of the team. Saturday evening was a huge buffet in a Congress Centre and a party afterwards. Sunday we spent more time with exploring the city until our flight back was departing.

From monday to friday we had our first bigger trip. In preperation to further trips, where we take tents and other gear with us, it’s necessary that we are able to ski on a certain level. We stayed in a “vandrerhjem”, called trollaktiv. There I was with 10 other people in a wooden house with self-catering. Every day we went to different ski areas and were improving every day. We had every day awesome weather conditions and the temperature was around -5 °C.

To experience camplife, sleeping at minus degrees Celsius, cooking with the stove and to test the equipment we stayed one night in the area around the university. We had some group games in the evening, a cooking competition and then we slept till our lectures in the morning 🙂

This day included to much rain to unpack the camera, so no photos. We had a trip to Jegersberg again where we divided the group into 4 teams. The goal was to find messages with tasks at certain points in the area (with compass & map), fulfill the task and come back to the starting point as the first. After less than 3 hours my team made it first. Owing to the rain and the cold I was pretty happy when it was over and having a hot shower afterwards (fingers were to deaf to open a jacket or turn a key around). Was still a good day to experience the harsh side of the norwegian weather 🙂

This monday we had a free day, so some of us decided to do a small daytrip to a cliff near the center of Kristiansand.

The first self organized tour (actually not by me) I did, was with my Swiss neighbours to a observation deck not to far of. Even if there were marked trails, it was all together still a lot of orienteering with map and compass.

The second tour contained a lot of practical games, which included: Carrying a “injured” person, guiding blind people, building survival shelters and making fire.