barbecue at Paul's

As promised some recent news from Kingston and my life...
Just last weekend we (Christian, Lenko, Mathis and me) were invited to a barbecue at Paul's house. You might know Christian and Lenko from my previous posts, they are the guys from my lab, but I don't think I ever mentioned Mathis or Paul before. Well, Mathis is a German writing his Masters Thesis here in Kingston. By now I believe he is already on his way back to Karlsruhe to defend his thesis. Paul on the other hand is the facility manager of our building at Queen's. He is a nice guy, he likes to talk and he likes coffee as well. So we started having a coffee with him every once in a while in our lab. Last week he called us and invited us to a barbecue at his place.

Since he lives a bit outside of Kingston and none of us has a car, he picked us up at the university. After arriving at his place we took a look around at his house and at his huge yard. He has four dogs so we started playing with them, throwing frisbees and we also started drinking beer pretty soon. Especially Mathis needed the beer quite bad, since he had a bad hangover and there is no better way to get rid of a hangover than by just keep on drinking...
Since Paul has a hot tub in the backyard we soon decided to jump in there. It was set on 100 degrees Fahrenheit and had some jets and all this fancy stuff. It was really nice to sit in there, getting a water stream massage, drinking beer and talking. Well, after some time our skin was all wrinkled and so we decided to get out of there and go to the party room in the basement of the house. We had some more beers and then started preparing some corn. The corn was really good and after that we started the barbecue, prepared the table and each had an awesome steak. Of course there was much more beer, I don't really know how much we drank this day, but it was quite a bit. Anyhow, after dinner we went back to the hot tub and relaxed some more.
Soon though the day was over and it was time to go. Ryan, another grad student who joined the "party" later, was still sober and so he drove each of us home and I for my part had a liter of water and went to bed.
Altogether it was an awesome day, I didn't get any work done, but sometimes you just have to take a break. Hopefully we can repeat that some day.

Here you can find some more photos.

to indianapolis and back

Just a few days before my birthday I went to the US again to visit Barbara in Indianapolis. She's doing an internship at a company called ProTrans in Indy during summer break and so that was the place to go. After some fun and a lot of waiting at Pearson Airport, Toronto and a rescheduled flight from Chicago I finally arrived in Indy.
Since Barbara had to work until 5 pm during the week I had lot's of time to clean the apartment, to do the dishes, to the laundry, etc, and of course to do some research for my thesis. During the first weekend we wanted to go to Southern Indiana to visit some nice cities and some caves but due to the weather we kind of canceled that an went to the nice town Columbus, IN. Even though you might not know this city it is kind of famous for it's architecture. A lot of 'well known' architects build some houses here so we walked around in the city and took some pictures.

The next weekend we went to Ohio to CedarPoint, the rollercoaster capitol. In this amusement park are 17 roller coasters and I don't really remember how many we rode, but there were a lot and the fingers of my two hands were not enough.
We started the day with a ride in millennium force. It was freaking high but since the engine was pulling you up really fast it was not possible to enjoy the sight. After that we rode some other rides including the Gemini, Mantis, Mean Streak, Cedar Creek Mine Ride, Iron Dragon, Corkscrew, Magnum XL-200, Raptor and so on. But there were some other rides that are not roller coasters. There was for example a huge swing, the SkyHawk, and this thing just scared the shit out of me. It looks like a swing and that's basically all it is, but it takes you up higher and higher. We also did the free fall thing and almost at the end we even felt ready for the Top Thrill Dragster. You get into a 'Dragster' and then you start and the thing accelerates up to 120 mph in 3 seconds. After that you go 420 feet up and then you basically just ride straight down again. This is something I have never seen before in an amusement park and it's probably one of the shortest rides you can Before you know it the ride was over but it was freaking awesome!
Since the park is about 5 hours away from Indianapolis we (about 12 people) stayed at a motel over night and the next day we went back to Indy.
That was the second weekend. On Monday we went back to work again but it is kind of a short week. Since July 4th is THE American holiday and Barbara was off work on July 3rd as well we had some time to go to Southern Indiana. Luckily the weather was really nice and so we went first to a little town called Nashville, IN. But we drove on, visited the towns Salem and Corydon, the first state capitol of Indiana took a look at the Ohio river and went to a cavern. At night we arrived in Louisville, Kentucky and met with Aaron and Angie. We had some barbecue and watched some fireworks. After the fireworks we drove home and arrived there around two o'clock. So we slept in on independence day and since we were invited for a barbecue at some friends who work with Barbara at ProTrans we went there. The 'party' was really nice, there was lots of food and we had some fun talking to the people and playing cornsacks or however they called that game. Unfortunately we had to leave the party early because we had tickets for the baseball game. The Indianapolis Indians were playing against Louisville. It was our first baseball game and it was kind of interesting to see how many families with little kids were there sitting on blankets. We almost had the impression that the people were not really going there because of the game but because of the socializing with other people. The game itself was kind of boring and to avoid 'rush hour' and to avoid getting wet, since some dark clouds were coming closer and closer, we left after the 7th inning and went back to Plainfield to watch some more fireworks.

Now I am back in Kingston and work hard on my thesis. The simulation is slowly getting along and I'll start writing pretty soon as well.

There are some more pictures, which you can find here.

Montreal

Once again, I have to apologize for not really keeping you up to date and not uploading the pictures I've taken during the last few weeks. I'm kind of lazy publishing here but I'll try to do better for the remaining few months. Although I don't think that there will be a whole lot worth publishing within the next few weeks since I'll probably stay in the lab from early morning to late at night.

Anyway, some weeks ago I went with Christian and Lenko to Montreal. A former roommate of Lenko lives in Ste-Julie so we had a place to stay over night. Before arriving in Montreal we went to Laval to go to an Apple Store since Christian wanted to buy an iBook. After that we left the car at a subway station and went by train into the city. We walked around in downtown and the older part of the city. Montreal is really a nice city, it's amazing to listen to people talking to each other. One asks a question in French and the other one answers in English and adds some more information in French, the language only depending on the mood of the people, I guess. Most of the people though like to speak French more than English and we even had problems in some stores but usually there is at least one bilingual person working at each location.

At night we met with Sebastian, a friend of mine from Magdeburg, and some of his friends and went to the beer festival. You had to buy some coupons and then you could try from hundreds of different kinds of beer. It was really fun and the place was packed with people. Unfortunately we didn't have much time so we left the festival and went to Jonathan's (Lenko's friend) house and fell asleep really quick.

The next day Christian had to back to the Apple Store because he discovered a bad pixel and wanted to get a replacement for his laptop. So Lenko and Christian went to Laval while Jonathan and I went to the Olympic Stadium of the '76 Games. It was really awesome and looked futuristic especially if you remember that they build this more than 30 years ago. At the stadium they also had the flags of all participating nations and German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was one of them.

After that we met with Christian and Lenko and climbed up the Mount Royal to take a look at the skyline of Montreal. Mount Royal is the highest point in Montreal and houses are by law prohibited to be build higher than this hill. Anyway, the view was really good and was worth the struggle of climbing all the way up. Since it was pretty late already we had some food at a restaurant called Reubens which is supposed to be famous for their roast beef sandwiches and finally we had to head back to Kingston.

Just a week after that we decided to go to Montreal again. This time we just wanted to do a day trip. Besides the three of us there was also another German called Jörg and Marika a girl from Finland. We basically just walked around in the city again. This time it was packed with people since it was Formula 1 Weekend and a lot of events were on the streets. We saw hundreds of Ferraris, Porsches and all kinds of other expensive cars. After climbing Mount Royal once again and having dinner at some restaurant there was a concert and a big party on the street. Finally we drove back to Kingston and arrived here around 3 am.

montreal