The whole class brought their luggage to the garage at Spicheren on Sunday evening. The pieces of luggage were loaded onto the trailer along with the skis and shovels. Len will drive the trailer with his car to the Aktiv Troll Camp in ….. on Monday morning. On Monday morning, part of the group took the 1.5 hour trip by car, the other part moved by car. When we arrived at the destination, Len and Tim greeted us. Tim is our ski instructor for the whole week. He will train us in practice as well as in theory.

First of all we moved into our new accommodation. We divided the houses so that the vegetarians and vegans were together and those who ate meat stayed in another hut. The purpose of the division was to ensure that special attention was not paid to the food.

After the room layout, Haron, Ho and I went to see the property. I still think it’s a habit from my time in the army. Always wanting to know what it looks like around me. The camp was bigger than I thought. A rope park tour in the trees ran through the entire camp. It also had a paintball and an archery range. Tim gathered us all in the theory room and introduced us. Then he introduced us to his assistant for the week, Sindre. As the next step, he explained the schedule for today. This was as follows: First, our material is checked and loaded.

A security check before we hit the slopes in the afternoon. But also a check whether the equipment fits us. Then the trailer was loaded again with our equipment. Have a quick meal and off to the slopes. Once on the slopes, the class was divided into two groups and divided between Tim and Sindre. My group was with Tim. What do you do first in a cold place or when you do sports? Right, a warm up.

After warming up we were instructed how to use the special bindings of the skis and tried to move. The exercises were a bit too lengthy for me. Maybe because I have been skiing at home for many years and have therefore tried most of them before. However, there were also a few students in our group who had no previous experience with skis and therefore had to build up slowly. Here I asked myself the question that one should possibly design the groups so that inexperienced members are together and experienced members form a group. Perhaps Tim also wanted experienced students to be able to support the others. In any case, a member forgot his skis in the camp and was therefore unable to practice the techniques. So I gave him my skis. I preferred to help with the other tips rather than doing the exercises myself, because I felt that this would be of greater benefit. We only made small distances so it wasn’t a problem for me to run. When we drove down the mountain, I stood on the back of Ho’s skis and went down with him. In the evening, we had a theory about the wax which you put on your skis before you hit the slopes. Tim explained to us how snowflakes are built and that it matters how warm the outside temperature and how old the snow is. The suitable wax is then selected based on these criteria. The most important part in terms of waxing the skis is the middle third of the skis. Most of our weight is there, which also has the largest surface area of the skis. That is why the most waxed in this area by far to achieve adhesion on the snow.

The next few days were more or less the same, so I don’t want to bother with it any longer.

Thursday was a special day, however, when we went on a longer ski tour, where we also learned how to rappel down a slope, like ourselves or someone else.