Apologies for the dearth of postings, but I'm going to make an earnest effort from here on out to post a few times each week.
The first blog topic I wanted to blog about was concerning the Nordic Ski Championships that were recently held in Oslo, Norway at Holmenkollen, which was the location of the Ski Jumping area of the 1952 Winter Olympics when they were held in Oslo. In order to host the 2011 Nordic World Ski Championships, Oslo revamped and built a new ski jump to meet the requirements of the tournament!
The Nordic Ski Championships are basically divided into two general categories- Ski Jumping and Cross Country Skiing, and are a HUGE deal in Norway considering that Cross Country Skiing is pretty much the Norwegian National Sport and Pasttime rolled into one.
As part of the festivities, there was a large festival held in the city center, along with huge screens for viewing and a giant stage for awarding medals by Nationaltheatret. It was so well attended that it was a bit of a pain to conduct day to day activities since all the subway stops were running off time- though the Norwegian metro system performed admirably under the heavily increased traffic.
The Chemistry Department at UiO had a booth at the festival that I helped man in order to celebrate the International Year of Chemistry- where we talked about chemistry as it related to the sports, e.g. How are skis made, how is snow made, what is the best kind of snow to cross country ski in, etc.
Norway did very well in the cross country skiing events this year, and as a result ended up winning the whole event overall and it was very exciting to be a part of that. We would take breaks in the middle of lab to go down to the cafeteria and watch the cross country relay races (Norway won both the men's and the women's.)
It was great to see how much spirit the whole country had. Lining the sides of the tracks were thousands of Norwegians waving Norwegian flags and wearing Norwegian hats and emblems. It was as if half the country flew to Oslo just for this weekend to cheer on their cross country skiiers.
