Ski – Trip #1

My next trip lead me to the Blue Moantains , where I went skiing with Stefan on January 31st.
We started very early in the morning at 7am and I was the first one at the bus. On the way to the parking lot I took a few pictures of the university campus:
Of course we drove again with the typical american school bus and it was awful for me, so less space in there 😦

The ride was about 3 hours. Unfortunately Stefan and me had no skiis or boots with us, so we had to rent some.
At the rental company there were at least 100 people but they were progressive and had a rental system on tablets, so it worked well and fast for me. After 30 minutes I had all stuff I needed to go on.
To be safe, I stated 10kg more than I really have so that I can go fast without losing my skis. But I was a little bit sceptical about the settings of my binding when he went back to the storage and after 10seconds he handed me a pair of skis, he did not do additional settings. I was in a hurry because I wanted to go down the slope so I accepted it.
We had a wonderful weather with sunshine and less wind until afternoon

 

After a few hours skiing we decided to take a break at the restaurant. It is quite different to Austrian one’s: You are not allowed to drink alcohol outside like our „Schirmbars“ and usually noone drinks alcohol while skiing. I can understand it’s much safer 😀
At the lifts they don’t have lbarriers where you have to put your ticket in front of it, there is only one gyu standing and sometimes checking if you wear your ticket on your jacket. I wear my one under the jacket because I don’t like to be a G.O.R.B so the gyu asked me a few times where I have my ticket xD
As you can see, Stefan was very exhausted after skiing all the double black slopes:

Oh, for better understanding here are the types of people you can meet on the slopes:

Before the day was over, we wanted to make a video of going down the steapest slope. Unfortunately Stefan failed to open the lense of my camera when we went down the first time, so I have no video of my performance =P
Then the second time……yes……what shall I say, remember the fitting I mentioned before. You can see what happens if you rent skis the first time in your life and you don’t have a look at the settings for your binding.

In the evening they closed all the black and double-black slopes so we were only allowed to go down the blue ones (blue is our red in America)
We went down only 3 times because it started getting really cold.

We left the biggest ski resort of Ontario around 6pm. I enjoyed it and as you can imagine, I went skiing a second time, but that’s another post 😉

See you fellows #1

Snow – Tubing !

Today I will tell you about my first ICSN – Event I joined
By the way, thanks to all for the pictures 😉

It was Saturday, January 23rd:
My friends and colleagues Stefan, Daniel, Victor, Jaana, Kasia and a lot more I met there wanted to go Snow-Tubing in Canada. Due to the fact that most of us haven’t done that before and the next park was only 20 minutes away, we decided to join the trip. Unexpectedly there were two full busses of students and as you can imagine, there was not a lot of space in the bus. By the way, the common ones for such trips are the yellow school busses you know from the television 😉
When we arrived at the hill, I was joking about the small area where we were allowed to tube down. After half an hour for buying tickets and going up the hill (walk up or take the ‚lift‘) we tried for the first time canadian snow tubing. Before I could try it, Stefan wanted to go first in a five people circle:

We did a seven people circle and told the gyu he should spin us. It was better than expected, I felt like in a rollercoaster but without any safety Precautions. As in the video below you can see my impressions, I tried to screem loud to animate my friends to do the same 😉

At our next ride we went down in 2 groups side by side and wanted to see who’s faster. Unfortunately the others won, probably they had eaten more for lunch 😀

 

After that we went down in different size of groups to find out the best combination. As I can remember 4 people had the best spin/speed relation. But we wanted to try somthing different: A line of 10 (maximal amount of people together was 10). Even the start took long because our line was so long. I tried again to capture all the emotions on video:

For my last ride I went down alone to try the maximum amount of spin and I wasn’t disappointed as you can hear.
Please forgive me my choice of words =P

The spin was so strong, it was hard for me to stand straight after I got out of the tube.

At the end of this post here are a few pictures of this amazing trip:

I hope I haven’t promised too much after my last post 😉

See you fellows #1

Waterloo – more snow

In my 3rd week in Waterloo we got a little bit more snow (not that much than few days ago).
The weather is similair during the week:
When it snows it’s warmer but of course cloudy all day and on all other days there is clear sky but really cold around -20°C and less.
But on these days I can take really nice pictures (All pictures in this post I have taken with my cell phone, bad quality xD )
The following ones are on the way to the university, I know one of them you can see a graveyard, but everytime I stand there waiting for the bus and there is nice weather the view is awesome 😀

We had to switch our classroom to another one and we got a cinema room I guess. It’s really comfortable sitting there and listen to the prof, but sometimes I could fell asleep, not because of the boring stuff, more about the nice chairs 😉

In the same week we had labs about semiconductors and in the following pictures you can find a nice long Si-ingot which they produce in their own lab at the university 😮

The second lab was about Vacuum Deposition and we had to wear some special clothes to be allowed to go into the clean room. One of my colleagues passed out during the visit because she had her last meal 8 hours ago xD.

During the week I went to the big mall in Waterloo to buy some clothes for my trips and some other useful utilities like the ONE flask. Finally I found one whit the right size for me 🙂
And you can see how they sell their softdrinks in the market. Imagine you want to buy a Canadian Dry Tonic Water (the yellow ones on the top) xD
I think they build this tower that it looks like their logo, I wasn’t able to figure it out.

Oh and on Pub-Thursday I went out with some canadian friends (2 of them in my class) to Morty’s for wings and to Molly Blooms for a few beers.
One of them has been in Germany and he started talking with me in my language in front of the others. Haha, it was quite funny, but everyone knows Schnitzel, I like that fact 😉

 

This post was quite short, but as you can see only some daily experiences. I guess the next one will be more exciting 😉

See you fellows #1

First Downtown pub night

Hey!

After the exhausting last weekend we preferred a more comfortable one for January 23rd.
We came together again at Stefan’s house to discuss about the night. There was this one event at our home pub: Drag me to the bomber. We knew that would be very interesting to go there, but unfortunately we started around 10. A lot of people were already standing in front of the entrance and as we came by the securities notified that they reached their limit. So we grabbed some free fruits (look close) and discussed again what we can do this night.

Our canadian ‚guide‘ suggested to go to chainsaw, it is an karaoke pub in downtown/uptown Waterloo  . We traveled again by bus and when we arrived it was very quite inside around 11. But that should change very quickly. At first before we got some drinks Nolan went to the DJ and suggested one of his most favorite Karaoke songs. Unfortunately the DJ was very busy and it took about 4 pitchers until it was our turn. Only 5 people were allowed to go on the stage and we only had 2 microphones to sing 😦

In the left picture you can see our performance. Nolan and Jean-Sebastian jumped into everyones performance as you can see in the right one xD
We also tried ‚Irish shots‘ I think they were called, it is Guinnes beer and baileys. You have to pour in the shot and then drink it all at once, it tasted strange 😮

Oh and Jean-Sebastian also made some new friends xD
Where did you get their logo?

Unfortunately the pub closed around 2 and we had to go. Our 2 friends from WCRI Jaana and Kasia (btw thank you for the video 😉 ) went home directly. But for the men the night wasn’t over. A few were hungry and so we went up King Street to find something to eat. As we came by a Poutinery I tried Poutin for the first time of my life. For those who don’t know what it is: It’s fries with toppings like cheese, meat etc.
Jean-Sebastian went out after he started eating, we thought he needed to pee but when he came back he told us he was puking. I think it doesn’t matter because he still finished his Poutin 😮

Finally we took a cab to Stefan’s home and I drank another bottle of beer and a few shots out of real Austrian glasses Nolan brought from Europe
😀

I went to bed around 5 in the morning and you can guess how much I did for university on saturday xD
It was quite a nice pub night and I am looking forward for more ones 😀

See you fellows #1

Niagara Falls

Hi again!

After our last trip to Detroit we used our time with Xena to do another trip. Due to the fact that Niagara is only one and a half hour away from Waterloo, we thought about visiting the falls in the Winter, maybe they are frozen? Unfortunately they only freeze if it’s colder than -10°C for more than a few weeks 😦

This time we didn’t start that early in the morning than for Detroit, so the sun was already up but as you can see for Jean-Sebastian it was still night =P

The ride was smooth and we arrived in Niagara around 12. The first thing to do was to take a picture with our honey Xena, she did a great job carrying us save to the big falls 🙂

Our first challenge was to find sthg to do because we didn’t plan anything for that day. Fortunately we parked near the ‚I don’t know the name‘ tower and we were hungry, so we went there for dinner. Surprisingly their offer wasn’t that bad, 25$ for an all-you-can-eat Buffet with a great view of the falls. We spent their more than an hour and climbed up the stairs to the observation deck to take more pictures.

After we were fed up we walked down the hill to the cliffs of the falls. Fortunately we were on the canadian side and got a real good view. In the pictures you can see one green tower, that is where you can go from the american side. I didn’t see any possability to go to the canadian falls (on the right side of the picture) from the US. Unfortunately during our shooting session (we did a lot of group pictures and asked plenty of people) it began to rain! I don’t know why, but at the falls it was at least 10 degrees warmer than in Waterloo. I had still my old boots which were not waterproof anymore, so they sucked up all the water and I felt really bad in them 😦
But as a confident hobby photographer I ignored that and took some more pictures and also a nice video with some comments of my colleagues 😉

After all that pictures we decided to head back to Waterloo. On the way to Xena I took a picture of a Casino there, it looks like an old one from the 80’s 😮
If you look at Victor and Jean-Sebastian you can imagine how steep the hill to the falls is 😉

We drove again about one and a half hours back and at the Village 1 parking lot we met stefan who took over Xena to return it the following day. At least he didn’t come with us because he had to do a few assignments, but now with this picture I can also link him to this post xD

Xena it was a pleasure riding with you and I am looking forward to see you again on further trips 😉

See you fellows #1