Norway Social

Here are a few pictures from the social that we went to. We went to the troll park which is a big deal around here. The largest troll in the world is here, it is 14km high. There is also the fairytale castle which tells of the Norwegian fairy tales and also we toured the ice hotel and had a drink at the ice bar. The glass that they served the drinks in were ice! You had to drink it fast or else the ice melted. Even more fun the drinking it was smashing the glasses on the ground when you were done. We had a three course dinner at a restaurant called TrollKavern. The whole place had trolls all around. The food was pretty good, we had smoked salmon with lemon and lime it was good lots of flavor, then we had reindeer (yes I ate rudolph :-P) it wasn't too bad, a different taste but not bad. Then we had cloudberries and ice cream. Cloudberries are rare and found more often in Northern countries, they are yellow and bitter. I guess they make good alcohol too but we didn't try any. It was interesting, it was a good thing we had Rune there to explain all the Norwegian stuff, like cloudberries!

Here are a few pictures of the fairytale castle.






Here are a few pictures of the trolls. The first one is of the huge 14km troll. I wish we could have gotten better pictures but it was snowing and we were being rounded up for dinner while we were trying to get pictures. The last two are from the restaurant where we had dinner.





The first picture is from this igloo that had a chess set in it. We were bored waiting for people get done with the fairytale castle tour so I was going to put Luke out of his misery with a giant chess pon :-P The second photo is of Hafjell Ski Resort, the 1994 winter Olympics were here in Lillehammer and this hill was were they did some events. We also saw the Viking Ship, which is were they had the Olympic speedskating event but I wasn't quick enough to snap a pic. The third one is the largest lake in Norway i just took the picture while we were stopped on the train heading back to Oslo. I thought that it was pretty.





Here are some pictures from the ice hotel. The first one is of the ice bar. I couldn't get a really good picture because it was so crowded. It was neat though the whole bar was made of ice and they had a huge bottle of liquor in an ice bottle sitting on the bar. The second picture is of wedding clothes that were in the ice chapel. The third and fourth pictures are of the chapel in the ice hotel. The last is a picture of Luke and Rune with their drinks...notice that the cups are ice. It was a good thing that they brought gloves.







More ice hotel pictures. The first is of Luke in what I call the man room. It had all sorts of power tools drilled into the wall, definitely geared more towards the male demographic. The second picture is the entrance to the ice hotel. The third picture is me at the ice hotel. It wasn't as cold as I though it would be, even sitting on the bed wasn't too bad.





The last picture is of the reindeer meat. I felt so bad eating rudolph! It was just weird to think of eating reindeer since it is so uncommon, but in Norway it is just as normal as eating beef or chicken. Everyone was making fun of me at our table because I was so apprehensive about eating reindeer, eventually we just decided that we weren't eating reindeer at all it was really elk :-P That was until Rune made the comment, " Yumm, Rudolph tastes fantastic!" It was a fun evening.