Friday, 25 June 2010

When I opened my eyes, I could hardly see. Half of my face was so swallen and it took me a good few minutes to focus my eyes. I was really worried as following my eye operation, the optician had said that a trauma might reverse the effects of the operation. So, I was relieved when I could finally see something clearly again.

It had rained on-off the whole night and it was kind of raining in the morning too. We had breakfast and packed our wet stuff. When Joel asked everybody during the morning exercises whether anybody had had a dry night, only about four hands were raised. We were glad it was our last day and we did not have to carry all the wet stuff on our backs for much longer.

When we got across the river, there was a house that we passed straight away and a while later we came to a house that had a sign on - hot tea and coffee, and there was the international VISA sign on the door. Just as I was about to jokingly offer to buy everybody coffee for breakfast, the door openend and the keeper of the house came out. We said hi and walked on.

As we got down to the paved road part, it really started to pour down. But at that point we knew we were only about a quarter of an hour away from the cars, so it did not matter too much. The rivers we had passed on our way up looked much more fierce now as there was so much more water in them. It was a beautiful sight!

Veronika and mum came to meet us and brought us Lauri's car. It had been fixed and we could sit normally in our small groups. We took a slightly different way back as we wanted to see a fjord. For those who don't know what a fjord is - it is a deep, narrow inlet, created by glacial activity. This means, that although it looks like any other lake in the middle of Norwegian mountains, the water is actually salty as it is connected to the ocean. Although, it is not as salty, as there are numerous freshwater waterfalls that feed into the fjords and make it less salty.

We also drove through several long tunnels. Joel's car was the first one and always seemed to speed up when entering a tunnel. We found out that the reason for it was the game they were playing - nobody could breathe in tunnel air. This meant that they were all holding their breaths the whole time they were in the tunnel. And as some of them were more than 2km long, Joel just had to go really fast not to run out of air before he got to the end of the tunnel. We tried it too, until we got to a 6km tunnel and were stuck behind a big lorry. We had to adopt another method to get through then - I hit the button which circulates air in the car, so no outside air could come in. So technically, we were not breathing the tunnel air. As we say in Estonia: it was JOKK.

We spent another night in Grimerud on the floor of the sports hall.