First adventure: spontaneous hike

Before I even arrived in Oslo (to be fair, I arrived quite late), somebody else had already had the genius idea of creating a WhatsApp chat for all exchange students at BI. And for today, somebody had suggested to go to Sognsvann, a lake in the Oslo area. Since I had nothing better to do (BI offered a sports event for today, but since I'm not into team sport, that's certainly not better :P) and didn't know anyone yet, I decided to join.

Sognsvann is an area where Oslo people go skiing, I realised on the T-bane. Yes, there's a T-bane going directly to the lake - the final destination is actually called "Sognsvann". And I've never before seen so many people with skiers on public transport! (Nope, I did not take any photos on the T-bane, that would have been too creepy...) But according to a Norwegian guy some of us talked to while waiting for the others to arrive at the meeting point, it's a very nice winter this year: cold & lots of snow, not the snow-rain-mud-combination they had last year. So I guess we're lucky!

Speaking of waiting: after doing exactly this, we had become a group of almost 20 people. Well, and then the hike began. I had kind of expected to walk around the lake a bit, maybe also on the lake (it's definitely frozen at the moment), but nope. Somebody suggested to walk up to a viewpoint where we would have a nice view of Oslo. And off we went... :D

I cannot tell for sure (unknown location + no sense of orientation = no clue where exactly we went), but I guess we did something like this:

I think it took a bit longer than that to get to the Vettakollen "hill", for obvious reasons (stopping to take pictures :P). But yeah, the landscape on the way there was really nice. Have a few photos:

Not to speak of the view when we had made it up Vettakollen:

The locals we met up there advised us to also take photos of the ski jump ramp you can see from Vettakollen, because it's famous. Since I'm not really into ski jumping, I have no idea, but if Google is not mistaken, this is Holmenkollbakken, the ski jump tower on the Holmenkollen.

And here are the pictures to prove that we were actually up there:

Well, but after going up, you will have to go down again eventually. That actually turned out to be the most difficult part of this adventure. Several people, including myself, landed in the snow at least once. Fortunately, we didn't have to go all the way back to Sognsvann station. Instead, there was another station closeby: Vettakollen station, of course!

Remark: I'm quite impressed by the public transport system here. The network is extensive (I mean, you can just take the city metro to the lake or the hill) - and public transport is actually working, although there are masses of snow, as you might have noticed. Imagining Mannheim's public transport under similar conditions... probably, there would be just no public transport for a while.