Well where to start for day four maybe? Not sure, first work day in Nelspruit. We started this morning with Yoga! Our friend Anil led us in a Yoga exercise this morning as four of us followed him in breathing exercises for ten minutes and then chanting om for the next fifteen minutes while sitting in the lotus position. Craig, Ethan, Mirko, and Veronica all had a great time and then Ethan and I jumped in the icy cold pool. It was quite a morning ritual.

Here's a picture of the pool we jumped into:

I then made friends with Rica, one of the people that works here and is an amazing cook. She's also the one that cooked the Braai (south african bbq) later that night. This is her in the kitchen at the main lodge.

As I think I mentioned earlier, the manor has a ridiculous amount of sitting areas, this is a view from one of the sitting areas down to another sitting area.

This is the spot at the bottom of the manor where we did yoga. Anil sat on the podium and we all laid out towels and relaxed. It was pretty amazing, we had an amazing view (See below) in front of us, and a waterfall fountain behind us.

This is the view from the breakfast area of the hotel. It's incredible. I also did a landscape panorama that i'll try and post up here later once I stitch it gother.

You'll notice the next picture is nighttime, so let me tell you what happened during the day. It was our first day of work, and this morning we met with all of the partners together to hear about what the projects would be. We have three groups here, Business Against Crime (BAC), Mpumalanga Parks and Tourism Agency (MPTA), and the Mpumalanga Economic Growth Agency (MEGA) which is the team that I'm part of. This team as I've mentioned before is further subdivided into two teams, one which will be focusing on doing a consulting revitalization for a painting production company, and my team, which is really just me and Chris, which will be doing the foreign investment project. We're still trying to get a handle on just what the project scope is, but as we understand it now, it's a couple of related things. First, Mpumalanga has to go to all of the South African country road shows, regardless of whether that country will be likely to invest in the province or not. This is considered an inefficient use of their budget and they'd like to be able to present and independent study (produced by us) which shows which their most and least likely investment countries would be. Another part of the project may potentially be doing a deep dive on a potential business plan and determining where the real potential is for investment and why it's value add for another country. This is kind of where the last group left off, so it may be likely where we pick it up. We have a meeting tomorrow with someone at MEGA to go through some of the further scope.

Tomorrow Chris and I will also be traveling to the third school that SA1 was unable to visit, hopefully to line something up for a visit to the school on Thursday. One of the things about our project that is both good and bad is that it is rather nebulous, very open scope. So while the other teams have many meetings prearranged and will spend a great deal of time working with people, we will spend a lot of time doing research and other analytics, so a more liberal schedule.

This is a picture of Marvin, he's our security guard, here he is looking pretty fierce.

This is Rica, right after she made us our delicious food for the Braai. We had a dinner with the tourism agency fall through so John and I thought it'd be fun to have a Braai in house with traditional south african fare.

Here's what that actually looks like. On the left we have mealie meal (a corn meal type dish), covered in a delicious tomato sauce, roasted squash in the top middle, salad top right, and then a tenderized beef steak covered in the same tomato and onion sauce.

Again, one of the many sitting areas as the manor, here's the whole group sitting down to dinner.

Things got ghetto at one point...atleats for me. Ethan and Craig went for mudras, while I found myself westside for the picture.

They set a bonfire up for us where we had a great time with everyone sitting around chatting trying to figure out what our plans were going to be for the weekend and for future weeks. Plan right now is to go to Jane Goodall's Chimpanzee reservation saturday morning, head to the third largest canyon in the world after that, and then head up the panoramic view to see God's window, the potholes and whatever else. And that's only Saturday! On Sunday, we're hoping to head over into Swaziland for the day and get some culture.

This is our fearless leader John from the CDC, he's fit very well into the group and I'm sure we all wish he was officially part of the team and staying here to work on projects with us, a really great guy. He also gave the german a hilarious hard time. More about that later.

More of us around the fire, remember, there's fifteen of us including John, so we take up a lot of seats.

Aforementioned German. This guy just wanders into the bonfire pit saying hello, asks where we're from, we say America, he says he's sorry to hear that and within like his first thirty seconds, despite us offering him a beer and a seat, managers to offend the four of us sitting there. At one point, John turns to us and says something like, This man has managed to annoy me faster than any other individual I've met. He gave vague answers to every question we asked, insulted every nationality there (there's nine countries represented), threatened to grow a hitler mustache, etc. To that last one, John's reply was classic, That [nazi germany level racism] is a little to close to what South Africa just went through, so seriously, not funny....no really, not funny.

It was at that point that Ethan had enough and decided to eat the german. It's a little grainy because of the speed at which the whole scene unfolded, but I can tell you that he was chewy, not very nutritious and henceforth spit out.

I guess that's it for now. We had a busy day and it's only going to get busier as we get more of a handle on the scope of our project and start meeting with folks.