It has been an absolutely crazy two weeks. I was busy last week trying to finish up as much work as possible before meeting my mom at the Copenhagen airport on Friday and heading to Norway. We flew into Oslo around 5:30 then took a two hour train north to Lillehammer. I have always been fascinated with the Olympics, and when we decided to go to Norway, I knew that going to see Lillehammer would be an awesome experience. As an added bonus, it sounded like I might be able to ski there.

Mom was a trooper through the long trip up to Lillehammer, including the hike up the hill to the hotel. We ordered some food from a delivery place, eating a late dinner in our hotel lobby before passing out. The next morning we FEASTED on an amazing breakfast spread and figured out our plans for the day. The Norwegian people in general were extremely friendly and very helpful. We managed to get on the right bus to Sjusjøen, a local ski area where the apparently make snow, so skiing was available. We caught a bus from central station, found our way to a rental place and got skis, poles and boots for the day. Although they were touring skis, my poles were a little short and one of the baskets was on backwards, we managed to get an awesome 2 hour ski in before taking a break for lunch. After some tea, yogurt and nuts I headed back out for an hour more (trying to get some good time in!) while my mom wandered around the area, watched skiing on TV and drank some more tea. It was almost completely dark around 4:15 and by then we were ready to call it a day.
All was going well, UNTIL we missed the bus back to Lillehammer. Shattered that we had to call and then PAY for a taxi ride all the way back, we made the best of it by having the cabbie drop us of at a nice restaurant where we had some amazing soup. We walked back up the hill to the Birkebeiner hotel and enjoyed some hot chocolate before heading to bed. The next morning we had great intentions to go for a long run, but upon waking up at eight and seeing that it was barely light out, not to mention that we were crippled from our day of skiing, we settled for a short jog up to the ski-jumping stadium where the Olympic torch was.
After taking the train back to the Oslo airport, we bought an express pass to the city and took the train in. We walked up and down the main street and made our way to the City Hall, the Nobel Peace Museum, the Palace, and a few cute shopping areas before stopping for dinner. While it was great to see Oslo, Sunday is not the best day to be anywhere in Scandinavia because almost everything is closed. We found a few souvenir shops that were open and browsed in them before taking the train back to the airport.

When picking up our boarding passes the kiosk told us that our flight had been delayed almost two hours, and would not land in Copenhagen until after 10pm…bummer. As my mom finished our perishable food items, I noticed that another SAS flight to Copenhagen was leaving in 15 minutes. We scarfed down the last apple and ran in and through security, and rushed to the gate. The man at the desk managed to quickly fit us on the plane, handing us new boarding passes as the door to the plane closed behind us. YAY!

My host mom, Inger, picked us up at the airport after learning of our surprise early arrival (our original plane didn’t end up landing until after 11:30pm) and drove us home for the beginning of my stressful yet fun week of juggling my school work, my family and my host family…all under one roof!