Day 10 – Kongsberg

January 1st, 2011

Ouch. Pain. Stiffness. Yeah, Happy New Year. Needless to say, I was not going skiing again. I watched a South Park marathon on TV while David got himself ready. It was afternoon and the sun was setting when we went off to the ski centre.

David took up his alpine skis and used my leftover pass from yesterday while I wandered about and took pictures of the action. David had joked that Norwegians were born with skis on their feet and it was easy to see why he’d come to that conclusion. Parents introduced their kids to skiing when it looked like they had barely mastered the idea of standing up. The beginner slope had special lifts for kids and was well used. The regular slopes were also quite busy with skiers and snowboarders. They even had some jumps and moguls set up and a few adventurous sorts were leaping off them. It was a pleasant sunset again, but not much in the way of clouds to add an accent to the procedings.

Once David finished his run we packed up and headed off to Knuttehutte, which was a lookout above the old Kongsberg silver mines. The mines were Kongsberg’s raison de être for many years. Themuseum and mines were only open for tours during the brief summer months though. The road got pretty narrow and windy but the view from up the mountain was something special. There was a cafe up there too, but it was closed; story of the trip eh! David tried to go further up the road, but it was snowed in, so he executed a perfect 17-point turn to get the car around and headed back down to civilization.

For dinner we headed out to enjoy one of the five main kinds of Norwegian food, if the type of restaurants that were plentiful were to be used as a judge of a nation’s culinary focus. The main kinds of food in Norway are as follows; kebabs, hot dogs, hamburgers, ethnic food (Chinese, Thai and Indian being the main varieties available), and pizza. So we ended up at a Peppes Pizza, which was one of the two main pizza chain stores in Norway. Dolly Dimple’s was the name of the other one. Peppes was decked out like a more atmospheric Hard Rock Cafe on the inside, with guitars and shrines to various bands throughout the restaurant. (Naturally, there was one to A-ha!) They also did take out, as evidenced by the constant stream of customers coming though. They were short some staff due to illness so it took some time to get served, but the pizza was pretty good.

Walking home in the freezing cold probably used up all the energy we got from the pizza, so we got some ice cream from the service station. Pretty good stuff too. Norwegians do chocolate and ice cream very well.

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