Australia Day Norway Style

Australia Day has been and gone. Festivities have been had all over the country in the traditional sense: Beer, Australian Music and Barbeques. I might be in the icy tundra of south-central Norway, but I wasn't going to let that stop me.

Me and the Butcher brothers, Duane and Clinton, make up the Australian trio working at Geilolia Ski School. Preparations started on Friday afternoon as we started shoveling snow from Clinton's roof onto his front porch. The initial plan was to make an igloo to house the party guests and set up a barbeque out the front. Still being reasonably unfamiliar with snow shenanigans - my enthusiasm got the better of me and what should have been 5 minutes of snow shoveling turned into about 3 hours. After building up the snow mountain with snow from the roof we hurled ourselves into the powdery field below to start hollowing out the cave. We needed to be careful about it as the unstable structure had the potential to collapse at any moment. Between digging I kept looking at the holes we'd made jumping off the roof- these formed the beginnings of our ice bar.

Geilo has received insane amounts of snow the past weeks and last week was no exception. We had a lot of snow to work with which gave us a lot of potential and a lot of potential shoveling. But it was all worth it in the end. The pictures I took don't do the whole set up justice and in all the excitement we can only hope to build it up further over the season. Right now the cave can only handle 4-5 people at a squeeze but we plan to fix that with time.

As the Barbeque began to sink slowly into the snow over the course of the night so too did people sink indoors out of the cold. We ended up having just over 20 people at the party and a good 15 of them made it out on our party bus to off piste. The Spark VM was on the same weekend so there was actually a pretty decent sized crowd out. A big night of drinking and dancing ensued. One of the best I've had since New Years Eve.

Good onya Aussie.

Det Bajsar Snø

Since New Years... and a little before... we have had about 48 hours where it has NOT been snowing. I have never seen anything like it. It's pretty nice though. Snow everywhere.

Days are getting busier, barely a second to scratch myself between running inside and changing boots; I have had days where I have gone from snowboarding to skiing to snowboarding to skiing to snowboarding again. Considering we are allocated 5 minutes between lessons... it's pretty hectic. I still manage to squeeze in a couple of runs in the freshly groomed pistes first thing in the morning though.

Flying down the mountain with my iPod on is one of the best feelings I know. Afterall, that's why I am here.

In music news: Every single night I have been out here in Geilo, I have heard Madcon - Beggin'. Being out of the international music scene a little I had assumed it was an American group. I was pretty shocked to find out they are Norwegian, and now listening to the whole album I am pretty damn impressed. It's all in English and pretty similar to the Black Eyed Peas' style. I highly recommened checking them out.

Gott Nyttår!

The past few days have been more or less the same as of late. Taking ski/snowboard lessons with Norwegians, Danes, Germans, Russians and English guests. I have been taking everyone from 3 year old German kids to 40+ year old Russian first time skiers. I had my first adult private on skis a couple of days ago and funnily enough it went really well. Having never stood on skis; in one hour I had Andrei doing nice even turns down the slopes. Go Russia.

It's New Year's Day here at the ski schol and everyone is understandably sluggish. I'm not quite as hungover as one might expect but I could certainly do with more than 2 hours of sleep. I am also fortunate enough to be scheduled on this week to set up/take down the

Our boss at the ski school, Linda, is a Swedish girl from Skåne (one of the southern provinces of Sweden) and is roughly the same age as me. Last night she put together a dinner for about 18 of us before we started the real new years celebrations at our local bar. After dinner we headed out the front and set off a few fireworks. Everything from little sparkler things to full on rockets.

Our regular nightspot here in Geilo is a bar/club called Off Piste. It sits reasonably high up and has a spectacular view of the whole village. After a brief but hefty dose of preparatory drinking/dancing we headed out to the balcony to watch as the whole valley lit up with all kinds of fireworks as the new year rolled in. Rockets were firing from at least a hundred different houses and street corners stretching out as far as the eye could see. We even had some people firing rockets on the street right in front of us up into the sky. I have to say this was far more impressive than any professional fireworks display I have seen and really gave a sense of a community of people all celebrating. Fireworks were still going off as I walked home around 4am. The money people must have spent on these things is simply mind-boggling. Sadly; New Years Eve 2007 saw the last legal private use of propelled explosives in Norway, I feel lucky to have had a chance to witness the end of such a long standing tradition. I understand why they're banning rockets:- I noticed they tend to shoot upwards at times and then at other times they decide to go a bit sideways... Aparently

A Sparka; "kick" in Nordiska (Swedish/Norwegian) is a small sled consisting of a chair mounted on a pair of flexible metal runners which extend back about 2-3 meters. There is a handlebar attached to the top of the chair back. The sparka is driven forward by one person standing on a runner, kicking backwards on the ground with the other foot, hence the name. The flexibity of the runners allows the driver to steer the sparka by twisting the handlebars. A kicksled works best on hard packed snow or ice- making the footpaths of Geilo ideal passageways. Living a good 15-20 minute walk from the village makes the sparka a godsend for me. A sober person can reach 15-20km/h on flat ground. Imagine what I can do down hill.