Yesterday we went skiing for a couple of hours, on the ski tracks on Tromso island. It’s very beautiful, you forget that you are in a city (not that Tromso is such a metropolis 😉 ). Everybody lives around the edges of the island and the middle is basically a big skiing area in winter.

It was a fun day! Hard work but it was great to be outside like that. The most difficult part is downhill cause it’s very difficult to brake on those kind of skies. We fell a lot! We went with two guys from Paul’s work and I was the slowest one – I would sometimes find myself at the top of a downhill, with three guys standing at the bottom looking at me and waiting for me to fall (as they all did…) – nasty guys 😉 Luckily I managed to stay upright better than they did, hehe.

There were lots of people enjoying the “good” (as in “no snow storm”) weather. It was fun to see people skiing with dogs! I had never seen this before, but they attach a rope to their middle and the other end around their dog, and use them to tow them uphill. All kinds of dogs too, we saw poodles and even little puppy’s! We also watched a competition at the ski jump, very impressive!! Paul has a better zoom on his camera so he managed to get some nice pictures of the jumpers. Here are some photos…

At night we went to the concert and reception organized by the Dutch embassy. We figured it would be quite smart, so I was wearing a dress and high heels, not very practical in this town! We had to get a taxi to town, it takes a whole 5 minutes… 😉

The concert was really nice, it was the soloists of the New Dutch Academy playing “early music”, meaning classical from the 18th century, played on instruments that are not very common anymore – a lute, a flute, an early (and very small) version of the cello. Simon Murphy (the director) explained a lot about the music and he was really funny – it made the concert a lot more accesible I think. Very nice!

The reception afterwards was good too, I was impressed how many Dutch people live in (and around) Tromso! Some for over 30 years… I even met a woman who comes from a village less than 4 km from where I grew up! Unfortunately there were no bitterballen (even though everybody seemed to be hoping for them!) but they did serve jenever.

Today we didn’t do much, my muscles are hurting too much from yesterday!! We did ski a little bit around the lake. It’s been snowing again today. I’m looking forward to next weekend – there will be reindeer races in the city center! I’ll try to get some good photos of course 🙂