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Wow it’s always incredible how fast time passes by…we’re gonna leave tomorrow and this is my last day in the office. I really got used to it and the people here are very nice and funny…now I got some new MSN contacts, as this is also company comunication.

But more interesting was the last weekend:
Last saturday night I have been out with Elyssa and here friend Lia. I picked them up at their hotel at Carton Rd. corner to Jarvis.
We had a glass of wine and talked about this and that, because we had to wait for Carolina who was working in a pub until midnight.
After we’ve finished the wine we decided to go to an irish pub just next door. It was very nice there, we and it reminded me a bit of england again On our way to this pub I realiyed why this area had not the best reputation for beeing kind of the redlight district. It seemed to be kinda normal to see the prostitutes offering themselves next to the cars….
anyways…we had some redbeer in the pub and picked up carolina with Elyssa’s car around midnight. I was already kinda tipsy so the more amazing was the drive to the party somewhere around Toronto. I don’t know where this was anymore.
We arived but I guess it was too late, because after we arrived most of the guys left. But we’re not to blame it was cool anyway just to see that canadian parties are not very different from our houseparties.
as far as I remember we stayed for about 1,5 hourse and I arrived at 4 at my hotel.

Sunday:
The sunday began pretty late at 1am. I woke up because of the noise outside my window and I remembered that somebody told me about a Christmas parade. I put on my clothes and went down to watch the parade. It was really nice weather and the parade was also funny. After taking thousands of pictures and a bunch of more movies I was sick of all the waiting and tried to find a shop for breakfast. But I had to find something on the same side of the road, because there was no way to cross the street

In the late afternoon I just decided to have a walk through the streets which turned out as a really good idea, because the weather was nice and lots of people were on the streets so it was nice to see Toronto getting dark.
I was lucky and when I passed by the Rogers center there was a bug american football game and because I arrived during the last 10 minutes I didn’t have to pay to get in and had the chance to take some nice pictures.
@sam: I tried to take some panoramas, so maybe u can put it on Stadionpanorama

Afterwards I decided to see a movie in the cinema , because sunday is a lazy day. I bought a ticket for “Jarhead” which turned out to be a war movie, which isn’t actually about war rather than a critic view about the life and the problems of the soldiers beeing at war.

On monday I didn’t do anything besides working and falling asleep early.
Tuesday was way more cooler, because we went to Jeff Healey’s club called “Healey’s” to see the Jam Session. It was really cool to see Toronto’s music scene and I felt a bit like in our youth club “Hugo” at home. We also made the experience that canadian beer isn’t strong at all, because after 3 pint of beer, I only felt a bit tipsy.

Ok, it’s alreay the last day now, because I couldn’t finish this article yesterday. I’m sitting in my office, already packed all of my stuff and I was the second person in here. I had some nice breakfast with bagel and coffee.
My plan for today is to have this math assignment meeting in 20 minutes, to go for lunch and a bit shopping afterwards and to get rid of all the coins in my trousers.

Ok, that’s it so far and here are some of the latest pictures:

Hello everybody,

so it starts to get really cool here finally…not that it wasn’t cool so far, but yesterday the night life session started for me

After having a really nice dinner with Rick and Heiko in the “Jack Astors” Sportsbar I dressed up for Toronto nightlife yeaaahh
After one week of finding out where the cool places are I made my way up to Richmond Street around ten o’clock.
It was true..there was one club next to the other. But all these clubs looked really posh and upscale, so I didn’t feel like going there alone. So I just entered a small english pub and started the night with a Guiness and an event magazin.
After that I just walked 2 times around the blocks just to get an impression about all the clubs. Fortunatelly I also went to a smaller street and finally I have found the “Horseshoe Tavern” – a real life music club. That made my day I got in and I realized that there were three bands playing this night, and I just missed the first. I paid 12 dollars which was ok for the quality.
The second band the “Matadors” (the first for me) was really cool. It was rockn roll pure and and they had even a skelleton who/which was singing a song and talking shit the people there were also really nice…I just felt comfortable.
The last band the “Fleshtones” seemed to be really popular in this area and already exist since at least 1980.
They were really good and it was rock’n roll “voll in die Fresse” 2 hours non stop. At the end I bought a CD of the “Matadors” because I liked them better. When I wanted to go home I met Elyssa, Brickie and Lia, three girls from Vancouver. It was funny because they were talking about weed behind me, so I just had to turn around …. That’s cool, because now I have a party to go tonight

Today I got up at nine in the morning and realized that it was a brilliant day. I had some breakfast and made my way up to the CN tower (click here for satelite map), the highest viewing plattform ever build by human beeings. The view was amazing and by chance I met Heiko who had the same plan as me and was still sitting in the tower restaurant.
There’s nothing more to say, so I just let the pictures talk, which are in a bigger version in the gallery.

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

So liebe Leute, mich ziehts mal wieder weg aus der Heimat, aber das ist ja nichts neues. Hiermit ist also meine neue Blogkategorie eroeffnet und wartet gespannt darauf, mit tollen Reiseberichten meiner kommenden Kanadareise gefuellt zu werden. “Warum Canada?” , fragen alle: na weils da cool ist – bestimmt.
Der eigentliche Grund ist noch einfacher:
Ich bin seit August bei AGETO, einer jenaer E-Commerce Firma zu Hause. AGETO ist eine Tochterfirma der canadischen Company Truition und da ich zur Zeit an einem Integrationsprojekt für das canadische Softwaresystem arbeite, ist es unerlässlich, dazu einige Dinge mit den Chefentwicklern – sprich Mama und Papa des Systems – zusammen zu machen.

Kurz gesagt: vom 14.11.2005 bis 25.11.2005 gibts hier Berichte und Fotos aus Toronto, wie man das schon von Englandzeiten von mir kannte.

Bei Google Maps kann man sogar per Satellit sehen, wie ich aus dem Fenster kucke

Bis dahin
Christoph