South Africa

With my off day from work yesterday, I decided to do another hike, likely my last here in Cape Town, but my first up Skeleton Gorge. Skeleton Gorge is another trail up Table Mountain but on the opposite side from Platteklip Gorge, the one I have been doing, and it starts in the back of the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. Before starting the hike I wandered through the gardens for about an hour, just taking in the beauty. When I first walked in, the scenery reminded me of something out of Jurassic Park, but the cool thing was how much the environment changed in different areas. One section felt like a tropical jungle while another felt like a barren desert, and there was almost every terrain in-between. Table Mountain was the only constant, hovering over the entire gardens. I walked through the animal-friendly gardening section, the scented plants section, the endangered species section, and finally made my way up the hill in the back to the start of Skeleton Gorge. The hike was m...

I wen t into the Longkloof Ba rclays' Aliens office for the final time yesterday, since Alwyn was on holiday again today, to finalize my projects and say goodbye to my co-workers. I honestly feel really lucky to have had the opportunity to work at Aliens, as the internship really had the best of all worlds - an interesting project with huge potential to impact many people positively, cool colleagues, flexible hours, and of course, free lunch. Here, I'm going to recap the work I did in the internship, similar to my post on RealWorld . As I said in my original post on Younglings a few weeks back, I was working on the "Youth Employment Pipeline project, designing and beginning to implement changes to the Younglings program that seeks to recruit tee nagers interested in technology, particularly those outside of the formal education system, teach them how to code, and set them up with a job from which they can launch their career as a software engineer." My main g...

Last Thursday iXperience hosted an Open Mic Night on the outdoor patio of the Bay Hotel, right down the street from the iX Village. I went over with some friends around 6, grabbed a seat on the couch under the heat lamp, and ordered dinner. It turns out the show didn't start until 7 (and our food came out at 7:01), but eventually the first acts made their way to the mic and started performing. There were a number of guitarists/ukuleleists and singers/singer-songwriters (including Rafi!), as well as poets, hip hop and Bhangra dancers, and a magician with a crazy card trick (though I'm pretty sure I know how he did it). It was a nice night (especially in our seats out of the wind) and was cool to see some talented performances from our classmates at iX. Last night there was another chance to get in front of people and behind a mic, and this time I was one of the ones up on stage. Brookwood Capital, Aaron Fuchs's (iXperience CEO) investing company, hosted a pitch event at...

I wrote a blog post for the iXperience blog about my experience in Cape Town with the program, focusing on my somewhat unique situation of doing iX after having just graduated. Hope you enjoy it!  iXperience After Graduation In May I turned in my last class project, took my last college exam, and graduated from Yale. Just one week later, I was back in the classroom. I am one of only a few graduated seniors studying here at iXperience, and while it is definitely an awesome opportunity for any summer of college, I think it’s particularly nice studying here in Cape Town as a recent college grad for a couple of reasons. First, because I was lucky enough to secure a job before coming to Cape Town, I am able to enjoy all of the amazing things there are to do here without having to worry about class rankings, getting placed in the top internship, or really impressing my boss in just four weeks. Of course, I still put my best foot forward everyday and complete all my work to...

As part of their grand world tour, Yale's oldest and most famous a cappella group, the Whiffenpoofs, came to Cape Town last week. I was under the impression that they had concerts in each city they visited, but it turns out that they perform very little on the trip aside from informal jam sessions for their hotel staff and guests as payment for their rooms. So, I didn't get to see them sing live but I did meet up with a few of them.  I interned with one of the Whiffenpoofs, Seth McNay, last summer at AV&Co. and when I found out a few months ago that he would be in Cape Town the same time as me we made plans to meet up. Last Friday the day had finally come, and we, along with a few other Whiffenpoofs, Wade and Michael, met at the base of Lion's Head to hike and catch up. It was a beautiful afternoon to hike, clear skies and relatively warm air, and (after failing to find Walley's cave) we made it to the top just in time for another incredible sunset. We talked ab...

Last night was movie night. The local movie theater, right down the street from Longkloof Studios, runs an incredible deal that is too good to pass up. For just R55 (~$4) we got a pizza dinner at Diva's Cafe Ristorante (I got salami) and a movie ticket to the Labia Theater. Add on popcorn (with powdered sugar and powdered butter) and Astros (chocolate biscuit bites) and the whole experience was only $8. It was a really cute little theater too!   The Labia shows a combination of old and new movies, and we decided to see Churchill , a drama about Winston's Churchill's role in the planning of the D-Day attacks. I hadn't realized, but Churchill was very much against the attacks, fearing they were too risky and too similar to another amphibious attack in WWI that had failed. He was obviously overruled by the other leaders, including Dwight D. Eisenhower (played by John Slattery, the Mad Men guy who was best friend's with Lexi's dad in high school) and ...