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Table of Contents |
Personal Homepage of Christian Seemann |
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Courses
Fall Semester
Blacksburg Halle Trip Thanksgiving 2002 Debate of MIS
OR Seminar
Some useful things
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I admit, we had some problems to find the youth hostel in Toronto. Yes, it is a big city with 2.48 million people. Somehow, the youth hostels are all downtown and this one in particular was the biggest one I have seen so far. Every bed has usually a letter in the room you are staying in. Guess what this means. Fortunately, I left my laptop at home. We decided to take off soon, not only because of the towing truck, which was getting close.
We got a parking space right behind the youth hostel and I learned that parking spaces are not always for free.
Toronto has the 3rd biggest stock exchange of the world and is also known as the Silicon Valley North, because it has the 4th highest concentration of commercial software companies.
48% of the people are immigrants, but it is still ranked as the safest city in North America. As far as I can say, Toronto is also much cleaner than other major U.S. cities.
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Christian had booked tickets for the basketball game on Wednesday in advance. So we explored downtown, to find out where to get these. We noticed that the ticket center was already closed (What, something is closed in North America?). Anyway, a friendly Canadian told us where to chill out at night. Getting into the club was not as easy as finding it. They accepted only Canadian Dollars. So we spent another half an hour to find an ATM, only to chill out for a few hours.
It was probably around 3am, when we noticed that the parking ticket was getting invalid around 6am. Therefore, I got up at 5.50am to pay with my credit card at the machine. This problem was solved until the guy who worked at the parking lot showed up. We actually wanted to park there until the game was over, so we talked to him in the afternoon. However, he was very angry that I paid at the machine. So we almost got into a fight (I am not getting up at 6am in the morning after 3 hours of sleep to get later pissed off by parking lot guy). Anyway, we got a parking space for the game hours.
The real cool thing in Toronto is the CN Tower, the highest free standing building in the world (550m and 181 floors). Even the ride with the high-speed elevator takes around a minute. The platform we paid for was at 346m. I admit, it was a bit windy that day. Jan and Christian were not very excited. My opinion about that: The tower stands there since 1976 and it will stand there for the next 2 hours (with a very high probability). We had awesome whether and we also went outside (a level lower). I did not like the steel grids on this level, but one cannot have everything. On a good day, one can see the Niagara Falls City and the Ontario Lake.
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The best thing on the CN Tower is the glass floor inside. You can directly see down to the ground. Some Japanese people had to jump there; we all understand and appreciate that. Never leave Toronto until you have visited the Canadian National Tower.
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Some sandwiches later, we took off to the basketball game Toronto Raptors vs. NY Knicks. We had tickets for the last row (yes, one can still see the players there). The Raptors lost the game. We feel sorry for them. Christian had to get to the court and Jan should take a picture of him. My task was to keep the security guy busy. I do not remember talking so much non sense ever.
We left Toronto a couple of hours later to drive back to Blacksburg. Christian and Jan dropped me off at my apartment after 14 hours of driving (again nearly in a Blizzard).
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