Detroit Auto-Show

Hey, in this post I will tell you about our trip to the auto-show in detroit on January 17th.

We were looking around for over one week to find something interesting for a trip. After a lot of discussions and a few beers, we decided to go to detroit where the mentioned auto-show took place. For this reason, we rented a car at Enterprise. Unfortunately they didn’t have the car we wanted to rent (the smallest one, I think it was Mazda 2 or sthg), but good for us, they gave us a limousine for the same price as the Mazda. The first thing to do, was to find a suitable name for our car, it had to be a female one. So during a really amazing lunch, we found a nice name for her: „Xena“. Accordingly to her strenght (2.5 liters, 182 hp) she was a real warrior princess 😀
After we organized the tickets and printed out the directions, we started our trip on Saturday morning 6:00. We stopped a few times to refuel Xena, because of our laziness, we didn’t look up how much fuel was left in the car. The company gave us Xena with only a half of the tank. Unfortunately all the gas stations were closed early in the morning, so we had to wait until 7AM to get some fuel.

So Daniel, Stefan, Jean, Nolan (Stefan’s roomate) and me drove over 3 and a half hours to Detroit to wait again one hour at the border for our Visas. There one of these „I want to be one“ officers served us. It’s quite a long time ago since I saw such a rude personality, probably because we entered the states?
Whatever, we tried to have a good time in our car with some nice songs (watch the video 😀 ).

Before we crossed the border to the states, I took some pictures of the Detroit River and I can tell you, it’s more exciting from the canadian side, because you can take amazing pictures of the downtown of Detroit. So we did and you can see the result in the following pictures 😉

Finally we arrived at 12:00 at the Koba-Centre where the auto-show took place. Also we found a nice parking spot on the top of the building. We spent more than one hour in there until we decided that we also have to eat something xD
One of the employees gave us a map of the surroundings and we looked around for something to eat, because in the building we were not willing to spent 7$ for a quarter of pizza. Unfortunately it was saturday, and almost all of the restaurants which were mentioned on the map were closed. After half an hour walking around the Centre, we found a sport-pub where we finally ordered beer and something to eat.
By the way, American Police seems to have a lot of money for proper cars 😉

Back in the Centre, we spent our remaining time (4 hours) to look around for some amazing trucks and sports cars. My most favorite manufacturer was FORD, they had a lot of trucks there and I mean the real big ones! But the most amazing car was the GT40, they had the very first ever made one and the newest one there. There were so many people around the new one, it took me 5 minutes to take a good picture of it, but I think it was worth it 😮

Daniel is in touch with the beast 😉

We also tried to take some funny pictures with the Michelin Man 😀

Tztz Stefan, my camera knows why it focused on the car xD

You can also find some other amazing cars, like the NASCAR from Toyota, which has 8000hp and drives faster than 450km/h or the Mercedes self-driving car where the passengers are facing each other 😮

After that exhausting day (5 hours going around ) we were happy to get back to our beauty Xena and without any incidents we arrived in Waterloo at 11:00pm. I can tell you it was a real nice trip, but if you want to go sight-seeing in Detroit, forget it, there is nothing worth it to drive there more than a hour or did we miss something?

See you fellows #1

 

Hello Waterloo !!

Hey I’m back!

This time I want to talk about my first 2 Weeks living in Waterloo.

One day before the term started, we had a Welcome Day where students and also Professors introduced us in student life.
There is a lot to do on campus, more than a couple of clubs to join like basketball, hockey, football, Chess, Concert band, Karate, Krav Maga, Archery and many more. I will try the Band and Krav Maga, something new have to be there for me 😀
I am so happy that I had no problems with my courses. Everyone else had to contact our coordinator for enrolling or dropping courses because of schedule problems.

But let’s go to the more exciting days in the Week:
First Bomber Wednesday in 2015:
On the campus, in the SLC building (the Student Life Center where a lot of restaurants are located) is also a pub what is called: The Bombshelter Pub, or easier: Bomber. Of course my friends and me had to go there to get into the student night life of Canada.
As you can see in the picture, the beers there have the right size for me 😉

It’s a pitty that we had to wait so long (1 hour) to get in, but therefore they limited the number of people in the pub, so it wasn’t crowded.
The best thing about the pub is, it’s open every day and night and every wednesday is a big party. It’s amazing that they have in canada the same attitude than in Austria: „Wochenteilung!!“
We also met a few germans there, found new friends and after a lot of beers and refreshing bacardi-cokes we went to the dancefloor to have fun.
Following you can see some pictures of that night:

On Thursday I had my second Photonics class and all of a sudden, there were MAXWELL equations again!!
On the one hand I was afraid of doing all that stuff again but on the other hand I was one of a few who did these equations before xD

The canadian food is very good, but unfortunately they don’t have real Wiener Schnitzel at the Resaurants. There are a lot of Burgers in several different combinations, but I had to do our traditional meal one time for myself. I was surprised that they sell meat in the grocery stores which is made for Schnitzel, so I wasn’t supposed to cut it.

On Friday we went together with Victor’s Mentor and Stephan’s roomate to a brewery/pub/restaurant for dinner. We got a lot of beer and after, we went to the LCBO for some more and drove by bus to the WCRI basement party 😀
I love the slogan the brewery has mounted in front of the entrance, why don’t we have such a poster at home?

On the way threw Uptown Waterloo, we came by a skating area in front of the mall:

I have to say: The canadians have a good taste when it comes to beer 😉

At the party on Friday, we met a lot of new friends too and as you can imagine, we met together on Saturday to have dinner at the mall I mentioned above.
Unfortunately, Stephan and Daniel were not able to join because of some work they had to do. Jean and me were the only ones at the table who ordered beer, probably the others were wasted after the party? xD

Last but not least, I have to put in this picture of our garden. Most of the time we have clear sky in waterloo and the weather would be perfect to go skiing. As you all can imagine: Clear sky means ice cold temperature and a good track. On days like these, it has about -20°C and less.

I hope you enjoyed it and I am looking forward to post some new impressions about my stay in Canada.

See you fellows #1

Toronto

Hi gyus!

It’s a long time since I wrote my last article, so this one is going to be a little bit longe 😀

After we celebrated New Years Evening at the Gouvernment, we stayed another two days in Toronto to go sight-seeing.
On January 1st we went to the biggest mall in Toronto, the Eaton Center. The Christmas Lights were very different to Austria, much bigger and much more, whole reindeers everywhere 😀
After, we went to the biggest square in Toronto, it’s like a smaller Time Square and only a few minutes away from the mall. The advertisements are really huge there.

We also walked around in Downtown for more than 2 hours and saw the big skating park and the townhall, it looks really awesome like a small BigBen in middle of the skyscrapers.

At the third day the 2nd January, we went with our host Taissa (thx for driving us to town 😉 ) to the waterfront in the south-west of Toronto to see the Skyline and take a few pictures. I think I took more than a few hundreds of them, because that spot was so awesome and the weather too.

Around the corner, there was a small moorings for boats, but unfortunately no one was there because of the low temperatures, the water was frozen. There were also a lot of awesome buildings along the waterfront which you won’t see in downtown.
They stomp out a lot of high-rise buildings over there. It’s unbelievable how fast this city can develop and it doesn’t stop!

After we spent there more than an hour taking pictures, we went to downtown and took a look for our sixpack we left ON A HILL in front of The Government, we tried to hide it there 😀
But it wasn’t there anymore, and looked around, I was also possible to take an   awesome panorama picture and spent some time at the „beach“. A little bit cold there, but the deck chairs were still there 😀

Then we drove to the Distillery district to have lunch. We went to the Mill Street Brewery and I enjoyed a typical canadian lunch. Maple Leaf Burger if I can remember 😀
The whole district is build in European style, like in Britain.

After lunch Taissa had to go and took us to MEC, an outdoor shop, where we bought a few clothes to survive the cold winter in Canada xD. In one of the pictures you can find a small tent, it is a throwable one for 25$ and for 2 persons 😮
We went for the first time ever to Tim Hortons and enjoyed a canadian coffee there 😀
Then we walked directly to the CN tower, on the way I took a few nice pictures of downtown and the Rogers Center, where all the Toronto Baseball games are played. It’s a huge stadion, which has a removable shell 😮
The skyscrapers look really awesome when the sun shines on them in the dawn.

We went up the CN tower during dawn but unfortunately we got a seat at the east side, so we were not able to take pictures of it. But I tried to take some awesome pictures anyway 😀
Sry for the reflections, but it was really difficult to do good pictures, when the Glass is tilted and the whole restaurant is moving. Exactly 360° in 70 minutes.
Oh and that I don’t forget, we had to order a main dish to stay there. The cheapest one was about 40$ and because we want to enjoy our time there (we stayed one and a half hour) we ordered a bottle of french Chardonnay, it was „only“ 32$ 😀
By the way, I LOVE to take pictures at night. Probably you can figure out why:

After our dinner, we took a look down from the FIRST glass-floor what was built in the world. A little bit high right?
Also you can see, that the CN tower was the highest building in the world until 2010 😮
The tower looks so high from the ground, but at least the restaurant is only at 350 meters, imagine how tall it is, there are 200 meters left 😮

Bevore we took our bus home to Waterloo, we went around the main streets in Toronto and I took another awesome night pictures. Especially take a close look at this apartment, it is like an opticall illusion, but I swear, no one of my pictures are photoshopped. Imagine how amazing it looks if you stand in front of it, it’s so awesome!!

So, I hope you enjoyed the pictures, the next posts will not be so long anymore 😀
See you fellows #1

 

New Years Eve

 

I think I will write my further posts in english because also a lot of friends from America read them and most of Austrians and Germans are able to read english texts and it will also be a good practice for my English-Lecture at the university 😀

Before NYE I walked around the campus to have a look at the buildings, there are a few new ones like this:

It’s not a campus as you can see it in lots of movies, but I’m proud that I have the chance to study engineering at the most innovative university in Canada.

I tried to get a few good pictures of our neighbourhood and I wasn’t surprised that here are also people who are proud to live in Canada 😀

After there was no snow at all the last 3 weeks I have been in america, we got the first snow on 31st, when I was on the way to the bus to Toronto. It wasn’t much, but it was something 😀

We arrived in Toronto earlier as expected and got picked up by my friend Taissa. We were allowed to sleep at her home, really nice of her and her family. The rumors I heard about Canada came true, the people are so friendly at all: We went out of the bus, looked around for a map of Toronto, it lasts 10 seconds and we were asked if we need some help 😀

The first activity we did together, was a tour at the steam whistle brewery. Really awesome place and a few free beers for everyone 😉

 

Our tour guide did a lot of jokes about alcohol, he looked like an american pie actor xD
After we told him we are from austria, he called us alcoholics and teased us a bit 😮

After the tour we got 6 bottles for 5$ and tried to finish them at our predrink, but we also got a bottle of bacardi, so it was a little bit difficult to do that in 3 hours xD
For NYE I only took some pictures and videos with my phone, because I didn’t want to get my camera to the club, it was really crowded there 😮
So I’m sorry for the bad quality:

And at least the Countdown: