On human-centered design
A truly human-centered organisation puts its people first – even above customers – because it recognises that they are the key to creating long-term value.
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674 – Johannesburg
Johannesburg… Johannesburg… I like you!
Review: Waterkloof Restaurant
tl;dr – Go to Waterkloof Restaurant for a special occasion to enjoy well crafted dishes and beautiful architecture.
Beautiful views from the table of False Bay and Sir Lowry's pass
The Waterkloof Restaurant opened a few years back and I’ve eaten there before. It was great to see that they’ve kept the very high standard for food, service and interior. Just the views and ambience makes Waterkloof worth a visit – if you don’t want to eat you can always come for wine tasting which is in the same building as the restaurant.
I like the easy price structure of the menu – there’s a fixed price on a 2-course and 3-course menu for which you can select between 6 starters, main courses and desserts. It doesn’t matter if you eat Salmon or a Beef fillet – it will always cost the same. You’ll get complimentary water, amuse-bouche and petit four as well as professional service from the waitresses just as expected from a fine dining restaurant.
The starter plate – a piece of art
The food itself was very solid – maybe my expectations were almost too high given the beautiful setup. I almost fell that the dishes were a little over-engineered and too much thinking went into the presentation rather than the preparation. The different sauce spots for example look great on the plate but come unfortunately without much flavour. But I’m complaining on very high niveau here – our monkfish and beef fillet were absolutely beautiful and elevate Waterkloof Restaurant to the top 5% in the country.
We ordered a bottle of Circumstance Chardonnay – which was so great that we had to order a second bottle and buy a case to take home. The bottle goes for R90.- and is in that price range my new favourite Chardonnay.
We left Waterkloof very happy only after 3.5 hours – that speaks for itself. It was a great experience indeed.
Main course: beautifully cooked monkfish
Name
Waterkloof Restaurant
Address
Sir Lowry’s Pass Road, Somerset West, 7129, South Africa
Website
www.waterkloofwines.co.za
Date of visit
07.04.2014
Damage
R950.- [2 course menu, 2 bottles of wine, coffee, tip]
Food
Service
Feel
Total
Eating and sleeping
While having a good cup of coffee I’ve realised that I eat out fairly often in Cape Town & surrounds and travel quite a bit – so why not review the places and write about them here?
I proudly present a new category: “Restaurant and Hotel reviews”.
Madagascar
Madagascar is not easy tourism. But it’s very rewarding tourism.
We’ve spent 2 weeks on the island and came home full of experiences and learnings.
On immigration you can feel already that you’ve arrived in real Africa. One person takes your passport with immigration card, carefully reviews it, gives it to a person who’s allowed to stamp, who gives your immigration documents to a person who’s allowed to sign and after long investigation you get the signature – welcome to Madagascar!
The trip from the airport to the hotel showed that Antananarivo is one of those cities that takes a while to understand. It’s the type of city that feels very chaotic – foot traffic everywhere, busses pulling over at random places to pick up people, old trucks almost giving up driving 20km an hour and the obvious brand new Range Rover in-between. But after some observations you realise that it is organised chaos. Chaos, that’s not chaos for people having spent every day of their lives in this city.
Strolling through the on-street market expanding from our first Hotel Le Logis showed immediately how poor Madagascar is. I have not seen such poor people ever before – 70% of all citizens on the island live with 1 USD or less a day. Madagascar feels however safe – no-one begged for money or tried to intimidate us even tough we sticked out of the crowd like a sore thumb.
After a day in the capital we drove towards Mantadia, the rain forest. Being someone enjoying individual travel I was first sceptical on hiring a driver through an agency who helped organising the whole trip. But after a few kilometres on the road I knew we made the right decision. The roads are in rather bad shape – we’re not talking potholes but 3 meter craters in the main road. Signage? Forget it. No signs no where.
I can highly recommend Priori – an extremely friendly and helpful agency who’ll make sure that you’ve got exactly the experience on the island you’re looking for. Thank you Pelasoa.
Walking for a few hours through the rain forest was an amazing experience – the fact that it rains every single day of every single year creates an interesting vegetation. The hairy, jumpy animals who appear in all shapes and sizes on the island were for us nice to look at but not main incentive for the trip as it seems to be for so many people. It’s however beautiful to see that the monkeys are just living their normal live – they are not caged in or controlled in any way. If you’re lucky you’ll see a few if not than not.
After 2 days in rain we were looking forward to travel towards the sunny East Coast. Tamatave – the main harbour city – is very busy and the most cosmopolitan city on the island. Everyone hustles and the ships seem to bring some international flair which can be seen in fashion, shops and food on the streets. The roads are dominated by Tuktuks, they form 3 lanes on each side of the road giving the cars just little space, resulting in colourful mayhem on the road. When leaving the city on a Sunday at 05:30 the streets were busy already – our bus was rather basic but the best form of transport to reach Soanierana Ivongo to take a boat. Sitting in the bus, without any network, no language knowledge and no orientation whatsoever triggered a feeling I haven’t had in a long time. A feeling of a beautiful helplessness. That’s how kids must feel when you take them on a nice Sunday trip – they don’t know what what’s going to happen but also won’t ask. Because they know it will be good good times.
Coming closer to the end of the 90 minutes boat ride to Sainte Marie the water started to take those crystal clear blue tones. It was the first sign that we’ve reached a special destination – sitting a few minutes later at the beach enjoying a good glass of wine together with grilled fish felt like being in paradise. The landscape forms those disgustingly magnificent pictures – those ones that Samantha the clerical assistant of the corporate in her grey cubicle used since years as her Windows desktop background.
Hotel Princess Bora is a beautiful place to be – spend at least 3 nights there, better stay 5 or 6 to enjoy life and yourself. I’ve enjoyed my- and ourself very much.
Madagascar is not easy tourism but you’ll leave the island with wonderful memories and stories to tell. It is rewarding indeed.
4 * 3 = ?
Human < Interface > System
interface |ˈintərˌfās| (n.)
a point where two systems, subjects, organizations, etc., meet and interact.
via: @hliriani
48 hours in Madeira
Madeira’s diversity is mind-blowing. You’re on top of the clouds on a windy almost 1900 meters high mountain and one hour later you’re sipping a Gin Tonic in the sun right next to the calm ocean.
The ever changing weather in Madeira hit me the day I was supposed to fly back when basically all flights got cancelled due to heavy rain and thunderstorm. Therefore the 48 hours became 72 with 6 hours in a queue at the airport. But still a great experience and absolutely worth the trip.
All pictures are with #nofilter – the island really is that colourful.
I love LX?
I had the pleasure to spend a weekend in beautiful Lisbon.
The city is absolutely worth a visit – it has metropolitan flair but is at the same time very lean back and affordable. I’m starting to like Portugal more and more – time to learn the language!
Which browsers are Africans using?
Quick answer: also Africans don’t like Internet Explorer.
IE usage is somewhere around 20% only – both Firefox and Chrome are leading the pack.
Data below is Google Analytics values from our properties in Morocco, Egypt and Nigeria – all of them are in the Top 100 Alexa ranking in the respective countries.
In Morocco Google’s Chrome has a whopping 49% percent usage, Firefox comes next with around 30%.
A pretty similar scenario can be seen in Egypt – also here are Firefox and Chrome accounting to almost 80% of all users. Looks like the North Africans don’t like Windows’ built in browser too much.
The Nigerian browser distribution is however different. Firefox is most used browser in the West African country while Internet Explorer and Chrome are each used by every 5th user hitting the page. Interesting is that 10% of the visitors are using Safari – most of them are iOS and not OS X users. “Only” 80% of overall visits come from Windows machines compared to more than 95% in the other countries. Looks like Apple has a good client base in Nigeria with its 160 Million inhabitants.
Above shows not too many surprises on the African browser usage. Browser statistics published monthly by w3schools.com show a decline of Internet Explorer since years while Chrome is becoming more and more popular.
