Hello guys,
just for my german friends who might wonder, why for fuck’s sake I’m writing in english, I gotta say, that there are some of my english friends reading as well…and I’m a lazy person…that’s it.
Info:
The complete gallery with the first pictures you will find here.
From the beginning
The journey started on monday at 8a.m in the train from Jena to Frankfurt Airport. Althought the train in Jena was a bit delayed and we had to catch the connecting train, everything worked out fine and we finally set off at 14 o’clock to Toronto.
The flight was pretty long just about 9h, my collegue Heiko and me tried to make the best out of it with sleeping, eating, and of course trying to flirt with the stewardess 
The last thing kinda worked, because when we entered the plane, Heiko made a joke about fat persons and mentioned a scene from Jurassic Park where a fat guy was in a plane…problem was that the stewardess heard that joke…later she told us, that in stewardess-slang/language Jurrassic park means, to fly with a verry old crew…that’s why they were a bit angry and kept an eye on both of us from the beginning on….
fortunatelly we could clarify this later 
After 9 hours of flying we arrived in Toronto an 17o’clock local time. This was the first time I started to realise what it means to be on a business trip…: that means, you’re not gonna take a taxi to the hotel…no, that means you take a Limo So we took the next limosine
available and felt like a fat cat and enjoyed the next 20 minutes of heavy traffic and crazy taxi driving stunts
Checking in the posh looking Intercontinental Hotel wasn’t as easy as we would have liked to have it, but there were just some minor issues with the booking. Heiko and me had a room together, which turned out to be a booking mistake, because actually we should have had 2 rooms separatly. So the room service came and brought another smaller bed
Still having a huge jetlag, we decided to go out to get something to eat, to prevent us from falling asleep immediately.
We found a nice restaurant, which was a mixture between a small pub, an italian restaurant and a fast food restaurant…unfortunatelly the prices weren’t fast-food-like… 
so each of us had 3 canadian beer and a pizza we shared….for 44$ – blame the first day for it
The office
After having a nice night of sleep (we went to bed around 9-10) and breakfast 
we made our way downtown to the office with the subway. It could have been such a nice day, but the weather played against us, so we had to fight against the rain.
we arrived around 9:30 o’clock in the office, and as we expected the canadian mentality, it was still pretty quiete and Rick, the Service Manager gave us a warm welcome.
The day started with a phone conference at 10 with the other offices in Boston, London and Jena. Heiko and me introduced ourselves and gave a short overview about why we are here, and what we have worked on during the last weeks. It was really cool to see how such a cross-atlantic meeting working. They had such a nice table conference system, with a mic and speakers, so everybody in the room could talk and listen. It was also good to see, that it was a real straight status update on the current project rather than just one hour of high-level bullshit drivel
This office is pretty cool. It’s one of these open-plan offices but it is not as loud and hectic as I expected.
So we have spent the morning with saying hi to almost everybody and get our computers set up to start working.
At lunchtime we went to the food-court next door, because the heavy rain spoilt the search for another place.
As some of you know, a food court is this typical american thing where you have a huge space like our “Mensa” surrounded by
small food stands.
Hotel Hunt
During the day the company organized that I get my own hotel room. Because in our first hotel was no free room, I got another room in another hotel. I packed my stuff after work and took a taxi to the Delta Chelsea hotel. Everything looked really posh here as well.
I also had some problems with the check in , because the company creditcard server didn’t connect, so I had to deposit 100$ for the first night for incidentals and I hope I can work this our today.
The room is a bit smaller but I have “queen size” bed just for me… and that’s more than enough
And because I’m busy as a bee I just had a little walk outside, before I prepared some stuff for my skype-conference with some students at home to work on a group assignment in mathematics. 
a new day
So I just had my conference at 6:30 and now I’m gonna take a shower and then I will make my way down to the office.
Ok, that’s it for now. I wish you a nice day and hope to get some news from home as well
Tschuess, bye bye, ciao and au revoir
Christoph