Days 21 - 24

6-28-13

            I have always felt the desire to develop my wine palette and today was an excellent opportunity to do so. After visiting three wineries in wine country of South Africa I feel I know a bit more about wine and the different types. I’m not saying I’m an expert or anything but I definitely know more than I did when I woke up this morning. I’ve never really enjoyed wine too much but part of me really wants to. Maybe if I drink enough of it, I will start to enjoy it more. I know that is NOT the case with tomatoes but just maybe it’ll work with wine. We went to three wineries today: Fairview, Morgenhof, and Louisenhof. My favorite was Fairview and my favorite wine was their Shiraz. I’ve always enjoyed red wines more than whites or roses but I’ve managed to narrow down my preferences. Hopefully I will be able to further my knowledge in the future as my wine palette grows with experience. On another note, the wine country here is amazing. The sweeping hills flow from one winery to the next with few dull spots in sights. I’m sure there are other places in the world with similar wine country views but I simply cannot imagine them.

            I am so grateful that this weekend is planned now. After working so hard this past week, this has been such an incredible stress reliever. I managed to remain relatively sober throughout the day, but that surely was not the case for a few individuals. For me, this provided some quality entertainment during the van ride back to campus. I hope to visit more wineries in the future and learn more about wine features and wine development.

6-29-13

            I managed to rest most of the day today before heading out to Newlands Stadium for a professional rugby game. I am starting to hang out with locals more often than not and it is so great listening to their stories getting to know their background. I managed to spend my time at the game with a couple South African locals and learned quite a bit about rugby. While rugby is a brutal sport and really fun to watch, I did not find myself quite as entertained as I am by American football. I guess I’m just too much of a Broncos fan to change my ways. However, that does not mean that I don't respect rugby players, because after watching the game, I now understand the danger of the game. The players are massive and in no universe would I ever want to play against them. Even the fans are bigger individuals, which probably means a large portion of rugby fans once played rugby themselves. I had a blast watching the rugby game and I hope to have the opportunity to see another game in the future.

6-30-13

            WOW. I just swam with the greatest predator in the sea: Great White Sharks. Well, I guess I wasn’t really swimming but I was in the water with them. Ok, so what, I was in a big metal cage protecting me from being eaten but it still counts! We were picked up at 5:40 this morning, drove two hours till we reached Gansbaii (pronounced Hansbai), ate breakfast, sailed out thirty minutes into the sea, and found ourselves in one of the most popular Great White Shark habitats in the world. I decided to get into the cage on the third round of people after watched a few 12 to 15 foot sharks swim around attacking the tuna bait. At this point my adrenaline was pumping and I was getting a little nervous. I squeezed into my wetsuit and goggles jumped into the cage. I kid you not, sharks were less than a foot from me and if I just reached out I could touch them, but I assure you, I didn't do that. I believe I saw twenty passes of sharks while I was in the cage of about four or five different sharks. Luckily, I managed to get into another grouping and experience the cage yet again. Unfortunately, this time I only saw about ten shark passes, but it was totally worth it. I dried off and relaxed as we returned to the shore for some lunch.

            I am so happy we were able to make this happen! After letting the first two weekends slip by telling ourselves that it would be the next weekend to go shark diving, I honestly felt we would never make it. This excursion was so worth and will surely be a highlight of this trip. Anyone coming to South Africa MUST go shark diving without question, even if you are terrified of sharks. I feel so lucky to have opportunities like these amidst this insanely busy and stressful program. I guess this may put us in a situation where we have to work harder during the week but I think we made the right choice. I’m only here for six weeks and I don't want to waste a single minute. Excursions like these reveal the incredible nature in South Africa. From Table Mountain to diving with great whites to weeklong safaris, there really is no shortage of amazement here. Unfortunately, I cannot do every excursion while I am here so I will have to return to see everything that I don’t during this short program.

7-1-13

            Back to work… I can already tell it is going to be hard to get back into the swing of things after such an awesome weekend. Now we start getting into the deliverables for our clients and I have to say I am pretty nervous. Failure is obviously not an option but I am nervous our final deliverables may not reach the highest quality since we have so little time to complete everything. It is definitely going to be an intriguing next few weeks. I simply do not want to disappoint my clients, who, even though are receiving free consulting, took a risk with us by accepting our help. We met with Luvuyo to finalize our funding presentation and he loved it. I am so excited to attend the presentation tomorrow morning seeing as this is such a lucky experience. We also began discussing the franchise model and did learn a bit about how to approach the model. We developed a basic outline and plan to adapt it as we continue. All we know now is that it is going to be incredibly extensive and it will not be easy. It should be fun… At the very least, it should be more rewarding to begin working with our entrepreneurs and actually implementing new strategies to help their businesses seeing as we have only done analysis up until now. The only issue I see now is that both of our clients have pretty developed businesses and do not require too much help in too many areas, which makes it difficult to provide four substantial deliverables for each. I hope that as we begin to provide the early deliverables, the later ones will begin to unfold and clear themselves up. The plan now is to get through to preliminary deliverables and go from there.