When I first started playing the saxophone in year 3 I would never imagined the opportunities it would give me whilst on the other side of the world. Playing as a member of Strømmen og Skjetten Skolekorps has definitely been a highlight of my exchange. I have been able to meet like-minded music lovers, learn to march and more recently go on a band tour to Arendal. The tour was the annual summer trip for the korps and involved extensive rehearsals, viking games, volleyball competitions, coasteering and a performance at a major festival. The tour went from the 11th to the 15th of August during which we stayed in cottages on the island of Tromøy, just a short drive from the city of Arendal.
Before the tour had even begun there was a fairly large amount of excitement brewing as it had been revealed that the Stortingets President would be watching our performance. The Stortinget is the Norwegian Parliament and the Stortingets President is a bit like the Speaker of the House, they are 2nd only to the Prime Minister and King. The current Stortings President comes from the same district as we do (Romerike) and so when she saw that we would be playing she decided to stick around to watch. She had, earlier in the day, officially opened the Youth section of Arendalsuka – the festival we were playing at so was, to be fair, already in Arendal.
Over the four days we had multiple rehearsals to learn and polish new pieces including a Michael Jackson medley, themes from Harry Potter, the Avengers, Uptown Funk and a song from Olaf’s Frozen Adventure. It wasn’t all work and no play though- there were a number of activities organised to keep things interesting, one of which was viking games for team building.
I didn’t really know what to expect but it certainly wasn’t what we got. After a couple of warm-up games we were split into groups based on age and had to stand in the middle of a ring of rope that was roughly 2 meters in diameter. We were then told that the aim was to be the last person inside the ring of rope and that the only rules were that we couldn’t bite or poke people in the eyes. What ensued was a bizarre sort of brawl that was strangely quite fun. Many rounds of this games were played with the conductor ever joining in. Some of the other viking games included a sort of stick tug-of-war where the last person holding on would win, tests of flexibility and balance using long sticks and an all-in tug-of-war with a piece of hide. Upon reflection these were probably the weirdest team building exercises I’ve ever done but I can’t deny that they were actually pretty fun.
A number of us were also able to participate in an activity called coasteering. Coasteering is a bit of a mixture of canyoning, swimming, climbing and jumping. We took a boat to a small island and we proceeded to scale the small rock face and jump into the water from a small-ish point before swimming around to another point. We were, of course, in full body wetsuits (water isn’t very warm in Norway, even in Summer) and movement was slightly difficult but it was very fun.
The culmination of the week was, of course, our performance at the Arendalsuka festival. Arendalsuka is a political festival and many different organisations and parties have stalls there with political debates on everyday of the festival. We performed as part of the Youth section of the festival, before the leaders of the left and right youth political parties spoke. Our performance was live streamed by the Norwegian Korps Foundation and afterwards we were able to meet and take photos with the Stortings President. The day after, an article about our performance was published in the Romerike magazine.
The korps tour was a great experience and was also a wonderful opportunity to see the Southern part of Norway!
