marissadventures

My plane left Ireland at about 8:30 on Tuesday morning, and I really had no idea what to expect when I arrived in the Oslo-Rygge airport around 11. After hesitantly navigating the airport, I found Mathias. It was so exciting finally getting to see him after almost two years! He drove me back to his house in Rotnes (while I pestered him with stupid questions about his country which I didn’t research enough beforehand, and he pestered me about different people from Fredericktown) and I met his sisters, Ingrid and Esther. He made waffles for lunch and then we tried to watch a movie, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open because of my terrible night of sleep the night before so he told me to go to sleep, haha. Ingrid woke me up for dinner and I met Mathias’s parents and brother, Joseph. After dinner, Mathias, his mom, his sisters, and I all went to Oslo. While they went to see Cinderella, Mathias took me around and showed me some different places for a few hours. I got to see a park, the palace, town hall and the marina, among some other stuff. It was pretty neat, Oslo is pretty small but it is very clean and has some cool architecture. After we got home, I tried on a bunch of different ski equipment and clothing to make sure I wasn’t lacking anything for the trip. In the evening, we had coffee, tea, and cake and just kind of sat down as a family and enjoyed each other’s company and went over the game-plan for the next day. (This is one of my favorite memories of the trip: It was so nice to get to have family time again after two months in Madrid by myself! And they made me feel so at home, it was awesome.)

On Wednesday, we got up and ate breakfast (this was my introduction to the open-faced sandwich, haha). There were like four different kinds of cheese, smoked salmon, two different kinds of sausage, eggs, jams, fruit, and a few other things, so I was pretty overwhelmed by my options, haha. After that, we packed up the vehicles and tried to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything. Joseph picked up his friends Lars and Audun, and we all left at about 1:30. I rode with Mathias, Esther, and Ingrid, and we had a lot of fun talking and jamming in the car. It was about a four-hour drive, so we stopped at McDonald’s about half-way through. It was pretty interesting, as they didn’t have a normal trashcan. Everything had its own recycling bin, from lids to cups to napkins. Also, I got sparkling water when I asked for water, so that was interesting (not a fan, haha). We got back on the road and the second half of the drive was significantly more scenic than the first with all of the mountains and such. Very beautiful landscapes! We got to Fagerli Leirskole & Aktivitetssenter (where we stayed for the trip) at around 6 and unloaded the vehicles and made our beds/unpacked until dinner at 7 (lasagna, Mathias probably ate an entire pan by himself, haha). I met Viktor and Maren, who are friends of the Jacobsen crew, and after dinner we played cards and Mafia (which I didn’t know was an internationally known game) and ate cake and drank coffee and tea. It was a really fun night, and I got to know everyone a lot better.

The next day we got up and ate breakfast at 8:30 (yay for open-faced sandwiches! By this point I’m starting to love smoked salmon) and packed our lunches (more sandwiches, haha). Then we got ready for our first day of skiing! I got all of my gear on for cross-country skiing and headed down to help pack the car. We left at around 9:30 or 10 and it was only about a 10-minute drive to the trail. Mathias, Ingrid, and I did a short trail (a littler over 5 km) since it was my first time. It was much, much harder than I expected it to be. The first kilometer took forever because I kept falling down every 30 seconds or so, but I eventually figured out how to balance (cross-country skis are a lot different than downhill) and the last half of the trail actually went pretty well. At the end of the trail was a little ski lodge, and we stopped here to rest and eat lunch/drink hot chocolate with everybody else. There was a special concert that day because of Easter coming up with some Norwegian celebrity singer, so there were a lot of people. It was also quite cold because of the wind, but it was tolerable. After the concert, we headed back on the same trail we had taken to get there, and there was a lot of traffic because everyone left at the same time. I was still quite slow on skis, half from not being very good and half from being tired, so I had small children passing me the entire way, haha. I did quite well until the last half of the trail, and I think I was just tired at that point because I kept sliding backwards when I tried to go uphill. I was quite glad to get back to the car, but it was a really fun day and I’m glad I got the chance to learn something new. We relaxed until dinner at 7 (I can’t remember what we had, but every day we had a soup, a main course, and a dessert) and spent the rest of the evening playing cards and different games and chatting. Great end to a great first day!

On Friday we did downhill skiing at Geilo. In the morning, Mathias discovered that he had forgotten both his downhill ski pants AND his downhill ski coat at home, so he had to improvise so he didn’t freeze. So typical, haha. 🙂 Downhill went significantly better than cross-country, even though I was CRAZY sore. The problem arose from all of the slopes being too steep/too slippery to be able to “plow” down without ending up going insanely fast, so I had to learn how to do the hockey stop to turn and to slow myself down. It was a lot of fun! One annoying thing was that you had to ski a fair distance from the top of the lift to the start of the slope sometimes. Since I was so slow doing this, the boys just started pulling me along behind them, hahaha. Once we were done, the rest of the day went very much like the last: dinner, ping pong, cards, and games!

Saturday we went downhill skiing again, and I was even more sore than the day before. First of all, my ski boots stayed in the back of the car all night (Mathias forgot them in there) so they made my feet numb when I first put them on. I ended up having to take them off and let them warm up on their own for awhile. On the first run of the day I had a pretty bad fall and ended up ramming my fist/ski pole into my jaw, but I was a good sport and kept skiing until lunch. I was sure I would have a large bruise, but it never did change color. It left a knot and I had some cuts on my neck though, but nothing too serious. We left around 2 and went back to Fagerli. I had just gotten out of the shower when Mathias comes in the room and says, “you know we’re having a ski competition right now that you have to participate in, right?” I did not know this, so I put on a coat (I was wearing leggings and had soaking wet hair and no gloves; great for Norwegian weather! Not) and followed him outside while protesting emphatically. I agreed to do one event, but Mathias’s mom and dad backed me up and said I didn’t have to participate if I didn’t want to, since I was definitely not comfortable enough with skiing to make a fool of myself in front of a bunch of people. My options weren’t exactly tame either: there was a cross-country race (would have been disastrous, because I’m not confident enough on cross-country skis), slalom (probably even more disastrous) and two different sized-jumps (NO. Just no.). It was fun watching Mathias, Lars, Audun, Viktor, Maren, and Ingrid do the events though. The final event was a group event with two sets of four-person skis where the four people on each team have to work together to get across the finish line first. I did end up keeping my word by participating in this one, and Maren and I’s team beat Mathias, Joseph, Audun, and Lars by a mile. I had quite a good quip after someone complimented me on the win afterwards, too (“That’s the American way!” I’m glad they found it funny, haha). Afterwards, I rested in my room until dinner. To my surprise, everyone was dressed up when I went downstairs, so I ran back up and changed really fast into the nice outfit I brought (Mathias obviously had just stopped informing me of things by this point). Celebrating Easter Eve is the norm in Norway instead of celebrating on Easter Sunday, which I found kind of odd. We had a nice dinner (I think it was lamb, but it was supposed to be a traditional Easter Eve meal) and afterwards we went through all of the candy that Mathias’s parents brought and split it up, and believe me when I say there was A TON. So much chocolate and gummy candies and strange things I’d never seen before, haha. In the evening there was an award ceremony for all of the participants in the ski games (everybody won and got a chocolate medal). It was interesting being the only one in the room who could not understand a single word and not get any of the jokes, which there were apparently a lot of! After the ceremony, we did our usual thing (playing cards and other games… seeing a pattern here? haha) and ate our candy, then went to bed.

The next day I was unbelievably tired and sore, especially since I had essentially been punched in the face the day before, so I decided I was probably too tired to cross-country ski. So instead Mathias and I stayed at Fagerli and played cards and ping pong and just chilled. We listened to sooo much Britney Spears, Selena Gomez, and Demi Lovato, hahaha. Everyone joined us in the early afternoon and we played cards until it was time to start packing up. We loaded the cars up and had dinner and said our goodbyes, then left for Rotnes. Mathias, Esther, Ingrid, and I had a lot of fun jamming on the way back. We even saw a few moose, but Mathias is lame and wouldn’t stop so I could take a picture of them. 😦 Haha, we made it back to Rotnes at around 11:30 and unloaded everything. We were all pretty exhausted, so we went to bed pretty soon after getting back.

Monday morning: my last day! 😦 I woke up and we all had breakfast at around 10 (as strange as I thought they were at first, I really miss Norwegian breakfasts) and afterwards, I finished packing everything up. I watched some TV with Esther while Mathias packed up his stuff and got dressed up to meet a friend later on in the day. At around 12:30 I said my goodbyes to everybody and Mathias and I headed for the airport. SO SAD. 😦 Mathias must have been sad I was leaving too because he missed the exit for the airport and had to turn around. Haha! I must say, I had such an amazing time with Mathias and his family and I’m so grateful that they gave me the opportunity to get to know them and spend Easter with them. I feel like I had to leave just when I was really starting to feel like a part of their family. I definitely am going to miss all of the friends I made and I hope to make it back at some point in the near future!

Hope you enjoyed my long summary of my trip! 🙂 Here’s some pictures (sorry there are so few, but I was busy having fun instead)

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Ha det!