Ski trip #2

This post will be very short about my second ski trip – actually I went snowboarding because I have no skis and the board costed the same.
We started at 3PM from the university and drove about 2 1/2 hours to Mount St. Louis, located in the Northwest of Toronto. As we arrived it was becoming dark. I had to rent the board and boots, the employee behind the desk was wondered that I didn’t rent a helmet. Of course it is dangerous but I never had a helmet when I went on the slope and that for more than 20 years. I hope my streak will keep going 😀

My friends Stefan and Matt also had to rent their equipment but Jaya had not to and waited for us 😀
As we headed to the lift it was already dark and the lights were on:

That was the first time in my life I went real night skiing and it was colder than every skitrip I ever did. It was about -25 degrees and terrible windchill. An ice chamber is warmer than that and I had only my sunglasses with me :O
Good that the slopes were really short so I was able to warm up in short periods of time. Also I had to put on the snowboard after every ride with the lift.

I did this picture from the top of the hill, you also can see the buildings down there, that is where the slope ends but there were also a few longer ones on the left side. I was happy that there were not a lot of people therefore I was able to improve my boarding skills over the whole slope 😉

We did one break to grab something to eat and a second to warm up because it kept going colder and colder. In the restaurant the really served „Sauerkraut“, I couldn’t resist to grab one with a hot dog and actually it was quite good 😮

In the meantime I lost Stefan and Matt further I went down the slopes with Jaya who also boarded this night. At our last ride we took, we unexpectedly met them again and I did my fastest ride down the hill. I should mention that I didn’t fell on this ski trip one time, in contrast to my first one if you watched the video 😉

We left Mount St. Louis around 9PM and arrived at midnight in waterloo. There were no busses going anymore but Jaya was so nice and drove me home, thx! A walk would have been about 40 minutes and as you can see, there was a lot of snow 😮
Oh and her car was the only one on the whole parking lot as you can see xD

I hope I have given you an impression about night skiing in Canada – probably I should say Ontario because it should be quite different in British Columbia (Vancouver).
My next post will come soon, don’t miss it. It will be the most exciting one 😉

See you fellows #1

Kelso Caves Hiking Trip

Hey again gyus!

Now I want to talk about the most amazing trip I did in January (ok actually it was on February 1st, but I count it as a January trip 😉 )

We started at 10am in the morning with 3 cars to the Kelso conservation area for a hiking and caving trip. As we arrived after one hour, we realized that all the parking lots were closed due to bad weather conditions, so we had to drive down the mountain to the slopes. That meant that we had to go up the hill, but of course, we went there to hike 😉

By the way the weather was not too bad in the morning, around -15 degrees but unfortunately no sunshine (ok for caving not really necessary). We put on our ice cleats / snowshoes and start walking up.

After we passed by the lift of the slope, we kept walking and reached the top of the plateu, we had a great view there and took a few pictures. As Jonathan (our organizer of this trip and passionated hiker) mentioned, photographs are one of the most important parts of a trip. By the way these pictures are mixed from all people who joined the trip, thanks to all at this point.

Further we passed a nice rock complex where there was one which stood out a few meters, we all tried a picture on it, but Behzad wanted to know it and creeped to the edge to take some more pictures.

We kept going forward for another 15 minutes and passed by a lot of places with a great view but unfortunately the weather got worse and we were’nt able to take more awesome pictures of the landscape. As we reached our final destination – the vertical cave, yes this IS the entrance under the planks – we dropped all our bags and prepared for it. Take off as many clothes as you want, grab helmet, light and camera and go for it 😀

We crawled down the entrance, which was really narrow, I almost got stuck there but fortunately the cave got wider but also deeper. As we went down we always shouted for the others to be sure nobody got hurt or lost. After about 20 minutes and ONLY 10-15 meters vertical climbing we reached the easy part where we only had to „walk“ for a few meters to have a nice spot for a break.

After a few minutes break we started to head back. We already knew the way so we splitted up. As you can see in the next pictures, it was quite narrowed there. Nadia also wanted to try a short climb up without any safety precautions. I am not sure now if it was in this cave or the other one, but does it matter at this point?

By the way I took these pictures with my phone because there was really no space for my DSLR =O
We started to head back and stopped at the ‚Hanging Rocks‘ as Jonathan called them (as I can remember, you know it’s one month ago already 😉 )
It was quite an easy climbing session but we had a great view and an awesome place for a second break. Never forget to take pictures wherever you are 😀

After this amazing trip which lasted about 4 hours hiking and climbing, we took one group picture to remember (unfortunately 2 of us already left at this time). Also as you can see the snowstorm reached us and the weather was becoming worse and worse. We went for dinner about half an our away from Kelso area where we got very good burgers. We splitted up the gas costs, all in all the trip costed about 10$ (excluded the ice cleats I bought).

As we reached Waterloo the blizzard hit the town really hard. It wasn’t possible to drive faster than 60km/h on the highway furthermore it took us two hours to get home, twice as much as the first drive.
Of course I got home safely, Behzad is a good driver 😉
A lot of snow fell down in this night and the day after all schools and universities were closed, except waterloo. As the biggest university in the area it has to be open all day. That was not the most snow I experienced but it was the only blizzard until today.
It was one of the best experiences in Canada since I am here and I really want to have more like this but unfortunately spring is coming, snow is melting and time is running out.

At the end here is the video Jonathan took in the vertical cave. It is quite long so I posted it here.

I hope you enjoyed my post and I have to apologize for a lot of days with no posts. There were a lot of assignments and exams to do but it will get better 😀

See you fellows #1

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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