South Africa

I've had so much good food and so many fun dining experiences on this trip, and I've written about some of the more notable ones at the Mt. Nelson High Tea, Frankie's Dinner, the Old Biscuit Mill, etc. but I thought I'd consolidate some of the rest into this one post. Warning: Do not read on an empty stomach. Let's start with breakfast. During the week we get a free breakfast "buffet" at Primi, a restaurant right next door to our room. We can choose from toast, eggs, bacon, sausage, Spanish omelette, oatmeal, yogurt, and granola, and the food is pretty good, but the people there are incredibly annoying. In particular, the lady who runs breakfast is so overly nice to a fault (I know how to scoop yogurt into a bowl, but thank you for making sure I am capable of doing it for the 5th time.) About 2 weeks in they started making us choose between "hot" (everything except yogurt and granola) and "health" (just yogurt and granola), which hone...

This post is dedicated to talking about the places I have been living, studying, and working here in Cape Town, to give a better idea of my immediate surroundings. To start off, I'm living at 32 Camps Bay Dr, in Bakoven, Cape Town (don't bother sending me a letter at this point - it won't get here in time!). In his audiobook I'm currently listening to, Trevor Noah describes Camps Bay as a quiet neighborhood where old, rich white people live (Trevor's father, who is white, retired here), and all the locals are surprised, and somewhat envious, when I tell them I'm staying in Camps Bay. It is quite a beautiful area, right across the street from a white sandy beach lined with palm trees and big boulders jutting out of the water. The ~200 iX students are staying in a sort of apartment complex with a great diversity of rooms. Some of the suites are incredibly nice, with separate bedrooms and bathrooms for each person and in-unit washers and dryers, while other...

Last night was First Thursdays , a big event in Cape Town that takes place on the night of the first Thursday of each month. It's basically just a big party in the area of Long and Bree Streets in downtown Cape Town. Wills, Thomas, Brian (a session 2 kid from Kenya I met last week), and I had dinner on Long Street at a restaurant called Tiger's Milk (who's slogan is "Dude Food Made Real Good"). It was packed, but we were able to get a row of 4 seats at the bar, and I ordered a big, delicious plate of ribs and a Black Label beer and was happy. After dinner we made our way to the art galleries on Church Street. As a part of First Thursdays, the art galleries stay open late for free, and some even give out free wine (but we were too late for the alcohol). We walked through a few of the galleries and saw a couple pieces on interesting art, and then moved up a block or two to the bars where we met up with some other iX students. We bar-hopped in the area for...

This weekend was the first without a planned iX excursion, so we were free to do whatever we wanted to do. I decided to hit up the Old Biscuit Mill on Saturday morning with a few friends to check out the food stands and shops at the tourist-attracting market in Woodstock. However, my roommate Henry invited me to a meet-up at the Ernst & Young office called "I am an Entrepreneur," where his boss at The Butcher Man, Arie Fabian, founder of Fabiani clothing, was giving the keynote address, so I started the day there at 9AM. After a nice start with a good breakfast and free pair of socks with palm trees on them, the first 2 hours were horrible. There were presentations from the sponsors, and the lady from Renault gave literally the worst talk I have ever seen. The next presenter, a director at Ernst & Young talked about common financial pitfalls new business owners fall into, and he wasn't much better. Finally it was Arie Fabian's turn, and he was able to somewh...

For the iXperience internship, I will be working as a product manager for Barclays Aliens, the development focused, more start-upy arm of Barclays Africa Group Limited that works on moonshots - innovative projects that will launch the company forward and keep it competitive in the 21st century. Joining me are 3 consultants, Katherine, Leah, and Eric, 1 UX designer, Liza, and 1 web-dev coder, Phil. We are all being supervised by Alwyn Van Wyk, a Barclays veteran who started Aliens a few years ago. We received a brief last week about the project, but it was basically just a list of buzz words like 4th Industrial Revolution, Financial Inclusion, and Youth Employment Pipelines, so it was helpful to meet with Alwyn Monday morning and hear his description or what he is working on and needs our help with and ask follow-up questions. After discussing the projects and our backgrounds and interests, we split up into teams to tackle each of the 3 projects. The consultants will b...

This past Tuesday night, I checked another item off of my things to do in Cape Town list - see a live jazz show. Cape Town, and South Africa more generally has a pretty vibrant jazz scene, and I've been wanting to go to a jazz club, so I was excited to see "The Crypt Jazz Evening" show up on the iX calendar on Allcal. Wills, one of my friends I've met here at iXperience, is musical (he plays 4 instruments and has seen Yo Yo Ma in concert several times) has been wanting to see a jazz show as well, so together we made our way to downtown Cape Town, got ourselves a table at the Crypt, ordered a few beers, and enjoyed the music. When we first arrived, the house band was playing some low-key instrumental stuff, but over the course of the night 4 different groups took the stage. Their styles ranged from chill beats to loud, upbeat ragtime sounds, and included instrumental jam sessions as well as nice vocals. There was one American man named John (who vaguely resembled ...

In the first week of the Product Management course, we were split into groups of 3 and tasked with coming up with an idea that we would develop into a product over the 4 weeks of the class. I was partnered with LB and Driz, 2 girls from UVA who would turn out to be great partners, as we gelled immediately while some of the other groups faced growing pains and were stuck in the "storming" phase for a while. We decided to go with my idea that I have been thinking about for the last few months, an online platform that serves as the one-stop shop for recent college graduates going through the apartment hunting process. We called it RealWorld, a name I'm still not a huge fan of (I'm open to ideas!!) and pitched it to the class as a Pecha Kucha, a presentation style in which you present 20 pictures (no words) for 20 seconds each. It was a strange format, but helpful in thinking about the idea in a different way. We would be following Lean, Agile principles throughout...