Today was the first Monday trip of the semester. During the course of our studies here in Norway we take part in 6 day trips into the local forest of Jegersberg. The first 3, are organized and delivered by the Norwegian students who are also studying Friluftsuliv, but of course they are learning it in Norwegian. Then after the 3 sessions, it will be the turn of us international students to plan and deliver 3 sessions. Anyway back to today, we started off by meeting outside the local gym next to  the university campus (Spicheren gym) at 9:15 am. Once we got there we were told we had to grab one piece of fire wood each and make our way into Jegersberg. They took us on a 15 minute walk until we came to an opening and we were told to put our bags down. We were then told we would be participating in different activities lead by different Norwegians. But to start off with, we played a game called sharks. Which involved running in a circle then when someone shouts attack everyone has to run back to their base without getting caught. We repeated this a couple of times and then they asked us to put our skis on and then to do the same game. However the university had not provided enough ski boots in my size so I was unable to participate in skis so I just carried on in shoes which actually made it easier for me.

Once we were warm, we split into 2 groups. One did slalom and a ski jump, when my group did this I unfortunately just had to stand there and watch as there was nothing that I was able to do in this except maybe run the course which wasn’t going to happen. Next, when we got moved onto the other side of the activities we just did different team game exercises like running races and trying to make a shelter with a tarp and finding the ideal place to put it. After all this was complete we settled down for lunch. Some people got a couple of fires started and many people had brought with them hot dogs so we enjoyed toasting those over the fire place and enjoying the heat it was giving off especially as the snow was making us cold when we wasn’t really moving considering it was lunch time and a lot of us were tired from doing all the activities. During lunch we spoke to the Norwegians to get to know them and it was interesting hearing about the way that they were brought up and how big the culture difference was compared to back home in England. At the end of lunch most of the people went to ski round the tracks, however those who didn’t have ski boots just had to walk home unfortunately but I had still had a fun day!