Det Stora Äventuret

It´s been a big weekend. Åre is hosting the Alpine Skiing World Cup which means the town is buzzing. The ski school was roped into helping out on the course which means I had to vest up and get in there with the rest of them. Our job was to follow the racers down the course to clean the track by ploughing away the excess snow. You don´t really realise how steep and icy the race tracks are when you see it on tv but upon closer inspection I found that a few sections were pretty damn scary to be honest. It was quite the experience getting in there amongst it.

After we´d finished up for the afternoon and the last of the racers had done their thing we met up with some others from our place for a ´Restaurang Race´. Basically it´s a Swedish pub crawl on skis. Awesome fun. At one of the bars the manager came out and counted how many people we were and then walked away again. We were a little confused: he then came back with a briefcase and pushed a button on the side. A little nozzel popped out and before we knew it we had a round of whiskey shots put out in front of us. What a champion.

In other snow news: I got some bad news the other day. My level 3 course next month has been cancelled. I was the only one to sign up so they couldn´t justify running it. Damn.

The big news? I bought a car!! It´s a little orange VW Golf and it´s awesome. All the Swedes are jealous and think it´s a wicked car. Whereas there have been a lot of hater comments from the Aussies. What´s all that about? Just look at it. It´s awesome! I need to come up with a name for it- It´s going to be hard to top Baby 7 and I don´t really like the licence POH 123. I may as well call it Whinnie because of that and the colour but that´s just queer. So it´s time to seriously plan my trip around europe. Roadtrip Bitches. Time to bust out the maps and look forward to Det Stora Äventuret!

Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah, Getting Swedish With It.

In case it is lost in writing: the title was an attempt at Will Smith's getting jiggy with it. Lame I know - Am I losing my blogging skills? Nah.

In many ways Sweden is not very different from any other western country. They eat meat and potatoes, they watch tv, they drink alcohol and they gather regularly for social events that involve being childish and a little bit retarded.

But it's not the similarities that catch my eye, but the differences. Some bigger than others, I have been picking up on little things along the way.

Swedes love their meat. They eat beef, chicken, pork and fish just like the rest of us. They eat big giant polish sausage things, massive chunks of pig marinated for an enternity, burgers, minced cow, marianted poultry and even all kinds of weird meat-flavoured cream cheese (A sampling of Betty´s salami cream cheese was scary but surprisingly tasty). A curiously common occurance when it comes to red meat is a side of jam. Lingonsylt is a regular accompaniment to meatballs, deer steaks, blood pudding (a much more refined version of English black pudding) and pretty much any other red meat they serve up. The idea seemed very strange to me and I wasn't too keen on it at first but it's starting to grow on me. A good plate of pannbiff with mashed potatoes, onions and brown sauce is nicely complimented by a big dollop of lingonberry jam. Mums! (yum)

I haven't had too much experience with real home-made meatballs but the cheap frozen type you get from the supermarket have become a staple in my poor season worker diet. Damn tasty. You can even get a plate (with Lingonsylt naturally) from Ikea back home. Highly recommend it.

Swedes love to fika. Basically it's sitting around eating various cake-type baked goods, drinking coffee or tea and talking shit. They do it all the time and get all excited about it. I had a solid 30minute conversation at work the other day about the joys of fika. I suppose the nearest Brittish-culture equivalent would be afternoon tea with scones but this is much more common and can happen any time of day. People go nuts for it and especially the girls get all excited at the idea. I played along at first thinking it was a bit queer, but the structured element of conversation has its merits. Go Sweden.

Hardly a Swedish game but one that occurrs regularly in our house is Beerpong. Dangerously often might be the way to put it. At least from my point of view it´s ridiculously addictive. Basically you set up cups of beer on either end of a table like bowling pins. You throw a ping pong ball from one end and try to get it in to the cups. When you succeed the other team drinks the cup. It´s a bit more complicated than that but you get the idea. Would you like to know more? We play a ´cleaner´version where we use water in the cups and drink correspondingly from a can. With 25 or so 20 somthings in one house - our house gets trashed badly enough as it is: the last thing we need is beer getting splashed all over the tables and floors... Writing it down here makes it seem a bit juvenile but what was that I mentioned about being childish and retarded? I´m just getting Swedish with it in my own way.

2 Months In

2 months into the season and it's been pretty average to be honest. Excellent snowfalls to start with and then a serious drought of the white stuff. Work is a little different with a new boss - she's no doubt good for the business but the atmosphere is a little different from the laid back feel that came along with my old boss: Lelle. He was a great guy in that he got things done but he left you with the feel of a friend you could hang out with and talk to easily. Our new chief is always away on meetings and has a no-BS approach to working here.

We had a new lift open up over on the Björnen side of the resort so the company put on a big meet, greet and ski day for everyone. It was a different experience because despite working in a ski resort - the staff here rarely actually go skiing together without putting in some serious organisational effort. We split up into groups and got shown around the new runs that had opened up and a couple of us actually snuck off to the side and found some make-do powder to play in for a moment. Then we head down to the new t-bar and had a little opening ceremony complete with champagne christening. This was reasonably comical as the champagne had frozen and took a couple of tries to actually smash the bottle.

To wrap up the day everyone skiied down to Tott hotel for some beers, an info session and a bit of light entertainment. They got some comedian up from Skåne (south of Sweden) and he was damn hilarious. It helped a little that people from Skåne have pretty ridiculous accents. I guess that´s kind of why Irish comedians are so popular: everything they say just sounds funny! It was a good chance to see everyone from last time I was here and to catch up. It was a company after-ski experience.

The next few weeks were a series of parties, beer pong, introduction sessions and training, concerts (check out Johnossi - some Swedish indie-rock) and general getting to know the crowd experiences. All in all there was relatively little snowboarding/skiing going on for my part.

Christmas and New Years at our staff accommodation was awesome. Swedes take both occasions much more seriously than us bogans from Perth. Both are a formal occasion with a 3 course meal, dressing up, drinking snapps at the table and singing drinking songs (a little more complicated and varied than he´s a bastard through and through mind you)

Fast forward to the 10th of January and it was time for our roadtrip down to Borlänge. Kim and I signed up for a snowboard instructor´s course (Swedish level 2) while a few girls who drove down with us were doing various other courses at the same time. We drove away from fresh snow and blue skies in Åre about 530kms south to a tiny little resort in Dalarna. We weren´t happy. The car ride was freaking classic. One girl snoring, another with the most hilarious laugh I have ever heard. She would laugh at something HA! (somewhere between and a mixture of a shreik, scream, cackle, giggle, snort and a cough) then we would laugh at that and she would laugh at us laughing and so on. We had several laughing sessions that lasted in excess of 10 minutes. Very theraputic.

We arrived at the big majestic looking hotel to +degrees and slush on the roads. I went to check in and they had no record of me in the computer even though I had parted with AU$1,200 to take part in this course. I was not happy. They were however, very friendly and accommodating and put me in a room while they sorted it out with the company. Not so bad afterall. Got to know a few fellow course participants and roommates briefly but got to bed early for the big first day ahead.
It was a small group of good riders. Everyone had their strengths and our couch liked to do relatively little talking and a lot of snowboarding. 7 days of snowboarding at a high level is something none of us were really used to. Teaching is nothing like this. We were buring around this little resort and slowly discovering that for a small place it was pretty damn good. Good runs, decent lift system, steeps, trees, a decent park... it really had it all. I was very pleasantly surprised in light of my low expectations. After day two we were all feeling it but having way too much fun to let that slow us down.

The 'nightlife' was pretty light-on at the hotel with lots of underage people and not all that much to do. There was a lot of sitting around talking, watching movies and playing boardgames. It was kind of nice but a few of us were getting restless. Our last two nights we head into Borlänge to check out the nightclubs. Friday night was pretty dead and we just got messy in the face of a lack of people but Saturday night was actually pretty fun. We started out like a bunch of lunatics singing and dancing in the car on the way to town. Sofi´s sister was very impressed with the roudy idiots she was chauffeuring around. We arrived in town and got some advice from some randoms and found a pretty decent nightclub as a result. Lots of drinking and dancing and randomness set us up for a good night and a painful morning... But totally worth it!

I made it through the course alive and found it surprisingly easy. I was a little nervous coming into it having not had the chance to practice much but I was told I had only minor areas to improve on and was actually one of the best in the written test. Not bad considering it was in Swedish! We had a long drive ahead of us back to Åre to start work the next morning. It was a good week all in all that far surpassed my expectations. I arranged to work only on snowboard upon my return to give me the chance to use my new certification - it´s nice to take a break from the skis for a little while.