week 10

one week holiday! we took ourselves some days off to get from toronto to montréal and visited interesting spots on the way. We decided to do this with a rental car which unfortunately had some problems. our reservation hasn’t reached the rental office and as we finally convinced them to give us a car, we were suspected of having caused some scratches on the first meters of driving out of the parking space ... weird!

an enormous traffic jam and some hours of driving later, we finally got rewarded for all this trouble by the impressive niagara falls and a cheesy pink motel in style of the 60s.

the next days we stopped at a very beautiful part of the lake ontario, took a boat to see the thousand islands, visited ottawa and finally montréal, which was rightly recommended by so many people.

we were happy to meet jen (from rocketday) there again and went to the oshega festival, a big music event.

week 8 + week 9

we worked at espresso. we got a really great job (that we’re not allowed to talk about because it’s still in progress) and our own room, called little bavaria. time ran by very quickly and unfortunately we didn’t get the chance to get to know most of the people very well because everyone was very busy. anyway espresso, with its mostly very young staff, is a fun place.

at the weekend, paige, a member of espresso, took us to a house-warming party. we had a lot of fun by talking to some nice and some crazy people. fortunately toronto has a great nightlife and we sampled the pleasures of it.

when we finally had to say goodbye to espresso, brian, the art director, presented us an awesome gift: a canadian fake-passport in which everyone left some nice words. thanks again for this creative souvenir! In addition to that, we got lots of helpful tips for our forthcoming trip and also a contact to an agency in montréal where we’re going to work next.

week 7

toronto ... what a great city! we discovered so many nice districts and walked around until our feet smoked. unfortunately we also detected reams of cool shops and spent to much money.

toronto was also the city that we got the most feedback from and thus we met two agencies and one design studio.

pantrypress was the first one. christian and julie, the owners, are really very friendly people. they showed us their great little studio with some beautiful old machines for printing and cropping. they do nearly everything on their own and we admired their individual style.

afterwards christian arranged a meeting with mr. li from movable, a quite big printing company. the friendly mr. li took a lot of time to show us around.

espresso was the next agency. we were cordially welcomed by some of the approximately 20 members and got a very nice job announced. we had a welcome-beer in the kitchen and decided to work at espresso for about two weeks.

the last agency we met this week was gottschalk and ash. We got to know udo there, a german guy who used to work with stankowski and now lives and works in canada since a couple of years. he gave us an agency tour, invited us for lunch and told us about the differences between canada and germany in the matter of personality and design.