A jumbo post to wrap up what a normal week looks like as a student musher at a folk high school in Arctic Norway!
Friday 22.1.21 – Saturday 23.1.21
Friday is always a half day; because we have class on 2 out of every 3 Saturday mornings, we get Friday afternoon off. After the normal morning routine, we have another valfag (elective), which for me is Sami fabric crafts. Last semester we made a Luhkka, a Sami hooded cape made out of felted wool, which was incredibly fun. I hadn’t used a sewing machine in over a decade, and at every single stage of making my luhkka something went wrong and I had to do it over again, but that only made the finished product even more satisfying to wear!
I'm unlikely to find a career in either modelling or fashion design but I was wildly happy to have made a wearable garment!
This semester we’re going to be making a leather coffee bag, which I am planning to keep dog treats in, rather than coffee. The materials haven’t arrived yet, however, so today we all bring our various knitting projects, and I also darn a couple of holes in one of my wool tshirts– an occupational hazard of working with dogs is that wool is quite vulnerable to their claws! Spending time in the sewing room reminds me of hanging out in the art classroom all the time in high school, with people working on different projects and a warm, kind teacher available to help with anything, so Friday mornings are one of my favourite times of the week.
After lunch, we have a whole school meeting, where today we are electing the new student council president. Each dormitory has a student representative, one of whom will be president. We vote, then discuss some issues that haven’t been resolved from last semester, and then we’re done for the day, and, in fact, the week.
This weekend is one of our free ones, so with no class in the morning, some of my friends from the dog line and I are heading up to the school’s cabin at Ropelv for the night. We always have the opportunity to go to town on Friday afternoons for a couple of hours to shop or run errands, and Ropelv happens to be about 45 minutes north of Kirkenes, our nearest town, which itself is 30 minutes north of the school, at the coast. 10 of us load our backpacks into one of the minibuses, and head into town to collect and send various packages, and pick up snacks before our ‘hyttetur’ (cabin trip).
Warming up plates for our pizza in front of our best friend at Ropelv, the wood stove.
It is -15ºC outside, and the cabin at Ropelv is heated with just one wood stove, so it takes at least an hour for it to get warm enough for us to take our coats off once we’re inside– I climb inside my sleeping bag on the sofa to stay warm. We have running water here, which is a luxury, but it’s cold water only, and there’s also no phone signal, so it’s a really nice break from the “real world”. This trip is part a belated celebration of Amila’s birthday and part “yay we’re all back together after Christmas break and quarantine”, so once we warm up, we get into cosy clothes and start making the pizzas we’re going to have for dinner. There is a sauna at the cabin, but we don’t have enough wood to use it and keep the cabin warm enough overnight, so instead we play Politisk Ukortekt (basically Norwegian Cards Against Humanity), knit, eat pic’n’mix, and chat about everything and anything (but especially an in-depth discussion about Norwegian dialects). The last time I played PU was about 3 weeks into the school year, so it’s incredibly satisfying to actually be able to understand the game without google translating everything this time! Eventually we traipse off to bed around midnight, ready for a lie in the next morning.
Saturday rolls around, and we have a slow start with our breakfasts and coffee. One of the teachers is going to come and pick us up at 2pm so we can get back to school in time for dinner at 3, and we need to pack and clean, but since we’ve only been here one night there isn’t a lot to do. A few of us decide to go for a short walk up to a nearby viewpoint and try aking– basically tobogganing, but using large plastic bin bags, since we don’t have a togobban here at the cabin. Unfortunately there isn’t really enough ice on the roads, and there’s too much snow on the fields for it to work, but I get some hilarious videos of my friends trying to scoot down the road on their butts, sitting on a bin bag.
We tried some different aking techniques, but there just wasn't enough ice!
Emma, Martine and I head up to the viewpoint, and as soon as we get off the trail, we realise we made a mistake: while it was a relatively mild -14ºC on the shelter of the road, the winds from Storm Frank mean there’s powder snow up to our knees, and the wind chill drops the temperature down to a frigid -27ºC. We so did not dress for this. Nevertheless, we drag ourselves up to the top, and the view is absolutely worth it, though if we were more than 20 minutes from a warm cabin it would have been a dangerous idea to let our hands and faces get this cold. Frostbite and hypothermia are no joke!
My 'I have to take a photo before Storm Frank freezes my ears off' face.
We clean up the cabin and drive back to school, and after dinner I decide to postpone the shower I am looking forward to, in order to go skiing again. It’s still windy and actively snowing, but I want to get in some more practice before our trip next week, so I put in my headphones with some pump up music, and head out. I’m still going around just the short 1.2km loop behind school, but for the first time I manage to get around without falling at all! I remember that listening to music helped when I was learning to ice skate, and I’m relieved to find that it still helps me find a rhythm with skiing 15 years later. The hot shower is even better and more satisfying knowing I’ve earned it by going out and doing cardio (shudder) in rubbish weather, so I absolutely revel in it. The rest of the afternoon and evening consists of more good food (Saturday supper is always something delicious) and watching a movie in the common room with friends, before heading to bed.
