NN days 9 and 10!

Hello Hello! I found that blogging while traveling that much was kind of overwhelming, so I decided to restart once I was back at school. And here I am! Now the school is on break, so it is just me and a few other NLC students at school. I finally have some quiet time in one place to tell you all more about the fantastic adventure!

So let's pick back up on day 9. The last time I wrote was about day 8. At that point, we had just stayed with the other students at Pasvik Folkehøgskole. Lots of fun. On day 9, we woke up early, caught an 8am bus, and drove back into Kirkenes. This day was by far one of my favorites of the whole trip. We wandered around Kirkenes for a while more until getting picked up in a fancy van that would take us to the Kirkenes snow hotel. On our way there, we stopped at a famous cave where Norwegian people took shelter during ww2. We got a quick tour of this interesting area, and overall I felt like I learned a lot about ww2 during the northern trip. The northern Norwegian towns were very involved in the war, which I never knew, and it was so interesting to learn about Norway's role in all the conflicts. Anyways. We got back in the van and drove about an hour to a remote spot in the snowy wilderness. We got dropped off in a little village-like area with sled dogs, reindeer in a huge fenced-in area, and tons of puppies! Because we were all a little in awe, we didn't immediately notice the huge mound of snow in the distance. The snow hotel! You can actually sleep in the snow hotel, but as you can imagine it is freezing. The beds are actually made of carved ice, as is pretty much everything in there. So instead we slept in these cute hobbit hole-like cabins right next to the hotel. They were the fanciest accommodations we had so far. I am not going to lie, I did a pretty bad job of taking pictures most of the trip because I wanted to try to be really present (I didn't do a great job haha). So some of these pictures are ones I found on the internet just to show you what things looked like. 

Cave! Obviously, electricity is a new thing in there haha

Listening to the tour guide

Picture from the website, here are our cut little cabins!

Also a picture from the website!

That evening we had time to relax, explore (Not many did because it was freezing and the shower inside was huge 😍), repack, and nap. We met later for a fancy meal from the hotel restaurant. After that, we explored the hotel and took a LOT of pictures. Here are a few. 

The is a hallway to the rooms where one can sleep

My lovely Helena

Group picture but I'm running to catch my falling phone. 

We climbed behind the "reception desk".

It was super impressive! We also found out that one of the classes at Pasvik folkehøgskole helped build the snow hotel this year! Weird coincidence! That night I think we all slept pretty hard. Sadly, we had to wake up at 5:30am and catch a 6am bus. Yay! I don't really remember much about this next day as I was probably sleeping most of the trip, but we made our way to a town called Karasjok where we were going to be staying for the next two nights. We walked over a frozen river to get to the grocery store which was fun. It was very very cold up there, but compared to the temps they has had the week before, it was mild. Which was sort of shocking for us to learn because our eyelashes and eyebrows were literally freezing. The woman who owned the cabins told us to be loud while we went through the forest because there were over 2 dozen moose in the area. Marianne decided to put Noah and me (The loudest Americans) in the front of the group so we would scare them off haha. It did the trick and we didn't come across any until we were almost back. This is when we got a far-off glance of a couple of them together. The picture is such bad quality but it was cool nevertheless. 

This is me trying to slink down the ladder to my bed because I didn't want to take my sleeping bag off. Like I said, it was COLD. 

Moosey moose

That evening each cabin made their own dinner and drifted off into a calm sleep with no wake-up alarm clock...

PS. I was in a small cabin with Merete, Marlene, and Helena. Then there was a cabin of boys and a cabin with the rest of the girls. 

Okay! That's about all I can type right now. Have a wonderful day and I will be back tomorrow!