On the weekend, 9th -11th of March, one of the main events in Norway took place in Oslo: the Holmenkollen Ski Festival.
General information about Holmenkollen and the Festival
ski jump arena
The Holmenkollen is a 371m high hill just outside of Oslo, with sports facilities, such as a ski jump hill and a biathlon and a cross-country skiing arena. The ski jump hill, the so called „Holmenkollbakken” is the oldest ski jump hill of the world and one of Oslo’s main tourist attractions. It was opened on January, 30th in 1892 and since then renovated a couple of times. The last renovation was made in 2011, before the world championship took place at Holmenkollen. Today it can host about 50 000 spectators. Austrian ski jumper, Andreas Kofler, reached the hill record in 2011 with 141m (Skiforeningen.no, historic & fakta). On Holmekollen you will also find the oldest ski museum of the world, which opened in 1923 (Skiforeningen.no, Holmenkollen Skimuseet).
The Holmenkollen Ski Festival is the oldest competion held at Holmekollen. It has been taking place every year in March since 1892. The only times it didn’t take place was in 1898, during World War II and in 2009, because of construction work. In 2011 the Nordic World Ski Championship took place instead of Holmenkollen. The following competions are going on: Ski-jumping, Nordic combination, biathlon and cross-country skiing(Skiforeningen.no, historic; Visitoslo.com, Geschichte des Holmenkollen). Despite from biathlon, which was the weekend after we’ve been there, we saw all the events .
Our weekend
We left Kristiansand Friday morning, with 3 cars and 13 people, all pretty excited for the weekend. After a good 4 hours’ drive we reached Oslo and went to the FRAM-museum first. The museum was really interesting. I learned a lot about the three Fram-Expeditions (Nansen & Sverdrup, Sverdrup and Amundsen) and the Gjøa-expedition (Amundsen) and especially about Amundsen and his team: how they survived and lived in the cold, how they planned and made their expeditions and what they had to struggle with. Amundsen was the first person doing the Northwest Passage and exploring the south-pole as well as the north-pole. The expedition to the south-pole was a close race together with Amundsen`s British opponent Robert Falcon Scott. Eight weeks after Scott, Amundsen started the expedition on the 9th of August in 1910. He brought 97 dogs, food rations for about 2 years and all the material to build a camp. The Fram, his ship, reached the Bay of Whales on January 14th, 1911. Here they built their base camp, which Amundsen called “Framheim”. On the 20th of October, 1911 Amundsen left Framheim together with 4 others to find the south-pole. They finally made it on December, 14th in 1911, 35 days before Scott reached the pole (frammuseum.no).
After the museum we headed straight off to the Holmenkollen. I and some others planned on going to the ski-jumping qualification at 7.30. But parking the cars, finding a good camp spot for the whole group and digging out all the space for our tents in the woods took quite a while, so we couldn’t make it to the qualification jumping. Instead we made a nice fire. Therefore we dug out a fire pit and made a snow-bench all the way 
around it. There were a lot of other groups camping all over the place. So it looked really nice with all the fire-pits in the woods and camps. After having dinner some of us went for a walk and we were sledging down the hill on a plastic foil with some Norwegian students from Stavanger. That was a lot of fun. The rest of the evening we were dancing (there was music playing) and sitting around the fire talking. I slept in a tent together with Theresa and Elena, a friend of mine from back home. As it wasn’t too cold I slept really well with my winter and summer sleeping-bag put into each other. The noises from all the people around us didn’t really bother me.
The next morning we had self-mixed porridge (oats with nuts, milk powder and some seeds) for breakfast. We cooked it in front of our tent and ate inside which was really 
cosy. After breakfast we left for the festival area. Unfortunately we arrived a little too late to see the combined men ski jump. So we were walking around the area and had a look at all the sports facilities. I’ve never seen a ski-jump hill in real, so it was really impressive. We also got some chocolate, cheese and fan outfits from the promotion stands, that were all over the festival area. At 1.30 the combined men cross country took place, which we watched in the biathlon arena. It looks so easy how they fly along the track with their thin skies. After that we decided to go back to the camp area, as the 50km cross country men started at 2.30 and we wanted to watch it along the track. But coming back to our camp was a shock. There were thousands of people all over the place, so
we could barely find our camp spot. Some tents got torn down partially and some of our things were already missing. We tried to fix it roughly, but as there were so many (drunk) people there wasn’t really a point in doing so. So we went a bit further down the hill (which felt like an obstacle course through all the people), to cheer the skiers passing by. After eating some bread and sausages I went back to the festival area with some others for the men ski jump. The atmosphere in the arena was really nice, we also met a group of Norwegians that are coming every year and talked to them for a while. It’s a lot more impressive to see them jump down the hill in real than on TV. So I enjoyed experiencing this event a lot.
After the event was over we went back to our camp. Now that most of the people have left it was almost quiet (the majority just came for the day, without camping). But the area looked like a battle field, with a lot of rubbish, cans and other stuff. So first thing we did was arranging our camp again, to make sure we could sleep in the tents for another night. Unfortunately our tent got destroyed a little, as well as one ski we used as a snow peg. And some skies, poles and shovels were missing completely. After everything was rearranged again roughly, we made dinner. Elena, Theresa, Barbara (a friend of Theresa) and I had chickpeas with tomatoes, red beans, carrots and onions, which was very delicious and filling. The rest of the evening we spent again sitting around the fire and dancing with the remaining people in the camp area. We also found some left-behind thermoses, sitting mats and foam mats, which we took home with us. If I had known that there were so many (drunken) people coming to watch the cross-country skiing along the track in the campsite area, I would have looked for a camp space a bit further away from the main area.
On Sunday morning we packed our things together and cleaned our camp area. Unfortunately Sarah left the gas bottle outside during the night, so the gas didn’t work anymore and we had to skip the porridge we prepared for breakfast. But Elena, Theresa
at Akershus-Fortress
and I made a lot of banana bread on Thursday evening, which we could eat instead. Once we’ve loaded the cars, the group split. Some were driving straight back to Kristiansand with Wyll and some went into Oslo. I had a look around the city with Theresa, Sarah, Elena and Barbara. We visited the opera, the Akershus-Fortress and the palace and walked along the main street. As the weather wasn’t too good that day (a bit of snow and rain) and we were a little tired from the weekend we didn’t stay too long. But it was nice seeing the main attractions of Norway’s capital. As the five of us had a flight to Alta the next morning we stayed in a really nice cabin close to the airport that night, where we dried our equipment, got ready for the next morning and relaxed and recovered from the intense but fun weekend.
References:
http://frammuseum.no/polar_history/expeditions/
https://holmenkollenskifestival.no/
https://www.skiforeningen.no/en/holmenkollen/skimuseet/
https://www.skiforeningen.no/en/holmenkollen/om-holmenkollen/historikk/
https://www.skiforeningen.no/en/holmenkollen/om-holmenkollen/fakta-holmenkollbakken/
https://www.visitoslo.com/de/artikel/geschichte-des-holmenkollen/