the spy in the rowing boat

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Location: Oslo, Norway

Monday, March 05, 2007

AAAAHHH

I HAVE SEEN AN "ELG"!!!!

Yes, after 3 1/2 years of desparate waiting and longing I have finally seen a real elk in her natural habitat (it was in fact a female elk). On today's skitour through Sørkedalen it was running past us only maybe 100m away... Amazing! (Luckily, I had 3 strong Norwegians with me, so I wasn't too scared)

Only stupid me had my phone stored in one of the innerst clothing layers, so when I finally pulled it out, this was what was left of the elk:




When you zoom in the pictire you might be able to discern a big fat spot (not, that's not part of a branch) far away behind the trees. This is the elk.

The art of "smøring"

Today was a very challenging day. A turkish and a German cross-country beginner embarked on a tour through at least 4 different types of snow. From wet to good snow over to very wet and icy... Although equipped with all different kinds of ski wax, it wasn't quite so easy to determine the right one. Yes, you might say, the German should now, but in fact, this one didn't.
Very unfortunate for the two adventurers, they started in a wet snow area, where blue mixed with red wax showed to have no grip at all. In their desperate attempt to move forward, they remembered they still had Klister in their bags, an extremely sticky substance, which they quickly began to put under their skis. It proved to work successfully for the next 200m, when they reached another typq of snowy underground: the good snow. Here it turned out to be quite opposite. There was no way to move at all. Not even downhill. The skis stuck to the ground.
After some heavy fighting the Klister off the skis where it ended up sticking to our hands, gloves etc. - but at least it was kinda off our skis, and some putting blue wax over the sticky layer, we managed to have a kind of ok skiing experience. Until we reached the level where snow began to turn wet again... But our disliking klister was stronger than our exhaustion over slipping on the quite slippery underground, so we rather fought our way with the slippiness than with the stickiness. Anyway, we had decided to skip any uphill parts and downhill went a lot better with non-sticky skis :-)