Holmenkollen 10.03. – 12.03.

On this weekend the FIS World Cup Nordic took place at legendary Holmenkollen in Oslo. It was a good opportunity to get know more about the Norwegian’s passion for sports.

We went to Oslo on Friday morning with the car and were the first of our class to arrive. We planned to tent not far from the arena and next to the skiing track. Once there we had to realise there were already other groups that were tenting at this campsite so we had to look around for a good spot big enough for all of us since we all wanted to stay together. It took us some time to set everything up and once we were finished we decided to head to Oslo downtown and to have a look around. There we caught up with some other international students which stayed at a hostel in the centre. We visited the city hall, the opera house and the shopping streets.

Later we had a big party at the campsite with 500 other people.

On the next day we went to the Holmenkollen arena to watch the cross country competition. It was just a 10min walk so we arrived there in no time. It was so cool to watch the professional athletes which were racing incredibly fast and it was impressive to see them gliding through the tracks. The weather was nice, the whole Outdoor Education class was there and everybody cheered for their nation (as long as it participated). Later on we went to the ski jumping competition in the arena which was dominated by polish fans. Us Internationals, we tried to keep up with them as good as possible with flags of our countries we bought in front of the arena before. (Un)fortunately we weather turned foggy just at the end of the competition so we went back to the camping site and we were excited to have another party but once arrived we had to recognise most of the other tents were already gone and the whole area looked pretty dirty. So our mood dropped immediately and we just had a little campfire and went to bed early.

On Sunday taking down the tipi we slept in, cleaning up our place and packing all our gear into the car took us longer than we assumed, so we were too late for the women’s cross country competition which was the only thing we wanted to see before we head to the museums. So instead we headed to the Fram and the Kon-Tiki museum right away.

Both museums were very interesting and I enjoyed the visit a lot although I already have been there before. But getting informed about explorers like Scott, Amundsen, Nansen or Thor Heyerdahl once again really let me daydream of being an explorer myself.

Tired from this busy weekend we drove back home afterwards.

Results from the Holmenkollen weekend can be found under: http://osloskifest.com/