Hello again!
This whole blog thing is harder than I thought. I guess it has not been very high on my priority list, and I can always find something else to do which seems more demanding. I will try to bump it up a few notches on the list. The following was started just over a month ago (eek!), and is way overdue. Here it is, with a second half and some comments.
Sorry, you’re not getting the second half of Wednesday the 25th. That day seems like so long ago. But there are other events, from even further back, that demand attention, namely Iglbu (There are also much more recent items of note, but I’m trying for a minimum of anachronisms, to avoid confusion). As you might have deduced from the photos or the map, Iglbu is a cabin, and was the destination of my second cabin trip. It was just over a month ago (edit: two months ago!), from the 13th to the 15th of February, but looking back it has been the single most exciting and enjoyable thing I’ve done here (second to Greece, now), so I guess I ought to tell you about it.
Even on the other side of the pond, I have found that many things are just the same as back home. One of these is juggling club. Being an avid juggler, I was very excited to see that there was an official juggling club here. I have been attending the weekly meetings, and have confirmed my suspicions that juggling, like math, transcends languages and cultures. Within a half hour at the first meeting I was passing seven clubs with a Norwegian juggler, and finding out that we were familiar with the exact same techniques, patterns, and tricks. Of course not everything is the same, and there has been a lot of exchanging of ideas as well. Perhaps because of juggling’s international nature, the juggling club attracts a lot of international students. Attendance usually consists of about half Norwegians, half internationals, and so it has been a great place to meet both the locals and the world.
Cabin trips are certainly the thing to do with a large group of people in Trondheim in the winter, and the juggling club is no exception. The juggling club, I think, was more of an excuse than a motivation. We didn’t juggle at all on the trip, but then that wasn’t really the purpose. This time there were several differences from my first trip with my international friends. The biggest was that we had experience. Or at least, some of us did. One girl in particular is a member of the group which maintains the cabins, and has gone on upwards of 70 cabin trips! She and some of the others had their favorites, and so we ended up with one a bit smaller and more remote than last time. Given that it had also snowed quite a bit since my last trip, this meant that skis were a necessity. Thankfully I was able to borrow a pair from Anders, one of the Norwegians in the club.
The group
There were ten on the trip. Four were Norwegian, three German, two French, and an American. We met on Friday afternoon, right after my math class, and took the bus an hour and a half south to Soknedal (Coincidentaly, relatives of mine also live in Soknedal. I didn’t see them on this trip, though I hope to meet up with them at some point). From there we set out on skis. The first bit was mostly on country roads, but after about a half hour we turned off the road into the woods. There was a clear path through the trees for most of the way, but no one had been through recently, and so we made our own trail. This was still February, and we didn’t get on the bus until 4:30, so it was quite dark by the time we started skiing. It wasn’t too hard to follow the person in front, though, and the blue-gray snow, black trees, and shadowy mountains in the background made the whole trip somewhat mystical. The darkness did cause some exciting parts when the trail took a turn downhill. In the middle of the night, the snow’s shadows and highlights were replaced with a monotone blue-gray blanket that gave us no hint of small (or big) bumps in the hill (You just have to let go and hang on, if that makes sense. Kind of like a rollercoaster). Fortunately there were only a few of these, as the trail was mostly uphill. The trip took nearly 4 hours, with occasional short stops for refreshments. By the end we would have welcomed an “unfortunate” downhill as it was close to ten, and we were exhausted. The exhaustion helped with the cold, though, which was fortunate because the cabin was of course not warm when we got there. Since it was small, it didn’t take long to heat up after we got a fire started in the woodburning stove. We then started dinner – chicken and rice – and ate a midnight supper.
The mountain we climbed
Saturday we did what one always does on cabin trips – find the nearest (or highest) mountain, and get on top of it! In our case the nearest wasn’t the highest, so we went for the highest. It was a beautiful day, and we didn’t have packs anymore, so the climb wasn’t too bad (I’ve also had two months to forget about the hard parts). It did provide a demonstration and quite effective advertisement for modern technology. Several in our group had ski skins – a strip of fabric with a tooth in it that attaches to the bottom of one’s ski. They only cause a little friction going downhill, and uphill they prevent nearly all backward motion. This alows fortunate users to walk straight up the mountain. The less fortunate must resort to zigzagging and herringboning, as Anders is demonstrating so beautifully to the right. He makes it look easy.
Herringbone
At the top we got stunning views of mountains, trees, and snow – no sign of civilization except for a few other cabins. We didn’t linger at the top, though, because the wind whips across the peaks making it feel like the tundra (Not that I would know. I’ll add it to my travel wish-list). On the way down we learned that cross-country skis are made for going across country, downhill skis are made for going downhill. It’s very hard to stop and turn when descending on cross-country skis. Like the previous night, you sometimes just have to let go and hang on, though these slopes were significantly larger. There was a lot of falling, and a lot of zigzagging.
View from the mountain
When we got back we carried water from a mountain stream for drinking and washing. We had dinner at a more normal time that night, and then sat around the table playing games, singing songs, and chatting. There was also chocolate fondue for dessert, courtesy of our French cook. There are song books at all of the cabins, which contain a delightful mixture of traditional Norwegian campfire and pop songs, as well as a lot of well known American hits.
On Sunday we went part way up the mountain again before skiing back to the bus stop. The way back was nearly all downhill, and took approximately a third of the time. On the bus we all sat in the back, and our laughter, remnants from the previous night’s singing, and perhaps some of the perfume of a two day cabin trip gave us plenty of room to relax.
