Its Ski O time!

I just did 3 new posts - this one is a little rambling so if you are not into orienteering puff or reading Emily's mad long posts check out the other two entries below this one, they have some cool pictures and are more short and sweet.

But if you stick with me you are a really dedicated fan (-: So.... another week went by in Trondheim with excellent ski conditions providing us many more days entertainment - AND - we also spent time doing more normal things like:

1. Chris looking for work, visiting NTNU, a career fair, various lecturers and companies
2. Emily visiting her new job and hoping to get some hours there!
3. Emily spending many hours waiting at the Police station to get her Residency Permit.
4. Attending O training with Wing on Monday night
5. Chris going to interval training on a Wednesday (a regular occurrence now - gasp!)
6. Emily learning to knit at the 'knit group' she was asked to join (-:
7. Buying more food supplies (a continual battle) from the local supermarket.

So anyway, then it was time to have another adventure (-: We were heading down to Lygna, near Oslo for the Norwegian National Ski Orienteering Relay Champs. (If you want to read more about it from a slightly more competitive view look here) Chris was going to be in Wing's second mens' team, while I was going to do the Saturday event, then do the public event on the Sunday. We stayed in the local clubhouse and when we arrived it was -18 degrees!

In the morning we drove uphill and the temperature rose! An inversion layer was upon us, so it was explained. Unfortunatly my Emit brick did not work (they use Emit here instead of Sportident) and I thought I was doing something wrong inserting the tricky shape into the corresponding tricky shape whilst trying to ski and navigate all at once - my brain was really overloading. It turned out these silly Emits have a habit of freezing in the cold weather.

The Emit started working at the 5th control or so and I got around the course ok, but registered as mispunched on Control 1 and they gave me a time of 2:05, which I hereby on this website declare to be wrong!! I was more like 1:05, grrr. Chris was a bit disappointed with his race and decided he definitly focused to much on skiing well and too little on orienteering well, resulting in bad skiing and bad navigation, a good lesson to learn I think!

We went for a short ski after the event and Chris got some tips from Øystein. After sitting round in the evening trying to read some magasines in Norwegian, then trying to play card games we did not know with the Norwegians, Chris declared "This is great - I suck at everything, I can't ski, I can't read, I can't play!!!" We all laughed, but I knew how he was feeling. Coming to a place like Norway really does sometimes make you feel pretty dumb and useless. They are all so good at what they do. On the other hand, one thing I have noticed is that noone seems to partake in something unless they are really good at it, so we can at least feel proud that we are good at having a go at lots of things even if we will not be very good at them. We do things to have fun!

Sunday was the National Relay Champs and there was a very small number of teams entered (reflecting back upon my don't do it unless you are very good at it theory). I took off on my public course and had a much better time, focusing well on the orienteering right until the last control (where I made a 4 minute mistake (-:) At least I nearly did it well!

This photo is actually from our ski orienteering in Sjusjøen but it is a good one anyway

Chris orienteered better too and managed to overtake someone along the way.

The hot black currant juice at the finish went down very well too. After a short time to explore the forest we jumped in the car and drove 7 hours back to Trondheim. We are back now, it rained today removing the fluff from the snow )-: Promise I will post again soon.

Klem fra Emily.