Today was our first trip with the Norwegian students to an area called Jegersberg, which is a series of wide paths and trails through the woods back behind the university. We met as a group first at Spicheren, the gym, and the Norwegian students had bought a big bag of wood. We each took a piece to make it easier to carry up and it was a really good idea. I’m sad to say that I don’t think I would have thought of that in normal circumstances.
We waxed our skis and one of the Norwegian students said that I was doing it wrong by rubbing the cork up and down to melt the wax. Instead I should just do it in one direction so that wax won’t get built up on both ends. I did it his way, which took forever, then all the other Norwegian students came and rubbed the cork up and down on theirs so I felt that I spent all that time for nothing haha. It must just be a personal preference.
On a previous day I walked the paths and noticed a pair of indented parallel lines that followed the path in the snow, and today when we were walking up the hill towards the lake someone went past us on skis, riding with a foot in each line. It seemed like a lot of fun. Once we got to the top and were in a small open field, they had us put on our skis to do some warm up games. We were playing different forms of tag while running around on our skis, which was really hard without using the poles. I did watch the Norwegians though and mimicked the way they ran about so that really helped.
Once we were done warming up we played around, had a relay race (super hard on skis without poles) and the other group practiced doing jumps. However when I went to the jumping station, I just practiced going down the normal side of the hill because I would still fall half the time.
After that and lunch, we got to decide if we wanted to ski on an easy route or take the long route. I took the long route with Martynas and Jonas H and Jonas was very helpful. He taught me how to properly walk uphill using the V method. It still took me a long ass time to climb the hills though and we fell behind the main group quickly. But it was a lot of fun and also really scary to go downhill in the ski tracks because I couldn’t figure out how to get out of them when there was too sharp of a turn.
Overall I felt that it was a really fun an productive day. Even though I fell down a lot I became more comfortable maneuvering around in my skis. I have high hopes that my skiing ability will improve, but I know I will never be as good as the Norwegians that were with us today. They were crazy! Practically skating on the snow with their skis!