From the 9th to 11th of March I have been to the Holmenkollen Ski Festival in Oslo with our class. For more than a hundred years, the Holmenkollen Ski Festival hosted international ski jumping and cross-country skiing events. The Festival brings thousands of people to Oslo to cheer from the ski arena or along the cross-country ski tracks in the forest.
We started our drive to Oslo with the car early in the morning. When we arrived there we first went to the Fram Museum at Bygdøy in Oslo. This museum is telling the story of Norwegian Polar exploration in general and it especially honours three Norwegian polar explorers – Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Sverdrup and Roald Amundsen. Nansen is known for his famous journey to the North Pole and Amundsen is known for his famous journey to the South Pole. I really liked the museum as it had a lot of information for the visitors in form of texts, images and exhibitions.
After visiting the museum, we went up to Holmenkollen. We arrived there in the late afternoon, so we had enough time to build up our campsite in the daylight. We shuffled ourselves a flat area for the tents and an extra area for a campfire and benches to sit around. Our campsite was just next to the skiing track where the competitions on this weekend were taking place. In the night time we were sitting together at the campfire. Furthermore a little bit down of our campsite there was a little dance area where we went dancing for a little bit later on. Moreover we went for a walk around the area. We were totally surprised to see that the skiing track was surrounded with Norwegians and their tents and little bon fire outside of every campsite. It was incredible to see how the other campsites were constructed. It looked really nice with all the bonfires around. All in all the track was alive with a night life and Norwegians everywhere, dancing, eating sausages, drinking and talking about the upcoming race they were excited and ready to see. For me it was really unexpected that even with the snow everywhere and the freezing outside it still had no effect on the Norwegians. They were in a good mood and excited for the competitions no matter what weather conditions they were going to party on.
The next morning we went down to the ski-jump, biathlon and cross-country-skiing arena. We watched the start and the finish of Nordic combined of the men in 10 km cross-country skiing and the cross-country skiing of the men in 50 km from the arena. It was fun standing next to the skiing track watching and cheering at the top athletes from such a close perspective. On top of this we watched the Raw Air ski jumping of the men in the team competition. It was pretty cool to see just how high these athletes were jumping from. The Norwegians really celebrated their culture at this event, as a lot of the men were wearing traditional Norwegian outfits.
I went back to our campsite on the afternoon just before the ski jumping to get some food and what was a pleasant and relaxed area in the morning turned into a crowded and crazy area. There were people everywhere drinking, eating sausages and watching the races. It was like a big party but personally I have to say that the people went a little bit too drunk and most of them didn’t take care about anything around them. Norwegians also invaded our bonfire area to use it for their own benefit which was not a problem as everybody of our group was away anyway.
After watching the ski jumping we went back to the campsite to prepare some dinner and have bonfire again. It was already quite late, therefore most of the people had already left the campsite area. The area around the skiing track looked horrible, there was trash everywhere. That is a great pity as it destroyed the good atmosphere of the night before. After this adventure-filled day all of us were happy to sit around the bonfire and enjoy the relaxed atmosphere with our group.
On the Sunday we just packed all our equipment together, collected a little bit of the trash around us and left Holmenkollen. Unfortunately some of our gear got broken and stolen. So we made our way back to Kristiansand with less skis, ski poles, tent pegs and tents.
As I had never heard of a festival in the snow before it was all in all an interesting experience. I enjoyed the Norwegian way of life and the culture about the ski sport.