Technological Society
This is the travel report for the Foreign Excursion Tour 2026 organised by Technologisch Gezelschap, the trip lasted from July 12th to August 2nd. The report consists of stories and pictures about our time there, with every day written by a participant of the tour. Company and university visits include the Dutch embassy, Chalk River institute, Shell Sarnia, Equinix, Fyelabs, McMaster university and Waterloo university. We were accompanied by TU Delft professors Pieter Swinkels, Robin de Kruijff, Bijoy Bera and Gabrie Meesters.
Arrival in Canada
After two weeks of hard work on the case study the day has finally arrived, the start of our trip to Canada is here.
This 7 hour flight was filled with watching movies, chatting with each other and of course playing games. One game was especially popular, Monopoly!
Montréal Botanical Garden
Today we went to Montrèal’s famous botanical garden, one of the largest in the world!
“Most people loved the highlights like the greenhouse, which contained lots of special plants such as cacti and fruit trees, and the Japanese gardens, which contained beautiful bonsai trees up to 120 years old.”
“In the evening we all had dinner together at a local restaurant. The delicious dishes that we took ranged from lobster to the Canadian dish poutine
Quebec City
After a quite exhausting walk through the city, we arrived at Gare Centrale and boarded the train.
Later we met up with others at Chez Murphy's pub where we watched the England-Argentina match together.
We ended the evening with a walk along the river and a group photo in front of the iconic "Quebec" sign before returning to the hostel
Chalk river institute
First we got a short history lesson about the site, where we learned that it was established during the Second World War and was disguised as an active military base to maintain the nuclear research being done a secret.”
Overall it was an extremely interesting visit
Dutch Embassy in Ottawa
Today we visited the Dutch Embassy in Ottawa.
Then at the embassy we got a tour of their office. After the tour, we went into a meeting room, where the Dutch ambassador to Canada, Margriet Vonno, explained to us about herself, her education and her previous work.
Then she went on to tell us about what she does as an ambassador and the importance of diplomats.”
After that, the Defense Attaché, Mark de Wit, told us about the military relations between the Netherlands and Canada and about the importance of working together more closely with Canada in the front of defense.
After that, we also got some gifts, a coaster made out of rocks from Ontario and a pin with the Dutch and Canadian flags on it.
Niagara Falls
Today we got to visit Niagara Falls. After a couple hours with the bus, we arrived. We immediately saw the big waterfalls.”
At the end of the tunnels there was a vantage point with a beautiful view. Here you were at one of the closest points you could get to the falling water.
Equinix
The visit itself was really interesting, and it was cool to see a different sort of company than we normally do at our excursions.”
“We got some presentations about what role data centers have in our infrastructure, and what role The Equinix data centers fulfill, and we got a tour of the building in which we got to see the computer rooms and the cooling systems used to keep everything cold.
University of Waterloo
We then visited a lab that focuses on producing plastics and other materials from wheat straw, which is also connected to a startup we would visit later that day.
Our final visit was to Velocity, a startup incubator.
The end of the journey
This was our last day in Canada.”
“At 4:05 PM, we boarded our flight to Amsterdam. After an approximately eight-hour flight, we landed safely
