Second weekend: Photos from Iguazú

Now for some impressions from Iguazú. Let me approach this starting with an overview perspective. Our hotel had a great view to the waterfalls:

View from the rooftop of our hotel

The waterfalls are distributed over a width of more than 2 km. This view from the hotel is up the river. The left side already is Brazil. The so called "Devil's Throat" canyon is located close to the Brazil side. From Argentina (the right side), a long bridgeway leads to the falls into the Devil's Throat. 

Before showing some impressions from the Devil's Throat, let me briefly explain the rest of the structure. What you see in the right part of the picture is the second part of the waterfalls. Many different falls add together to this section of the Iguazú waterfalls. The second part of the photos shows various impressions from our walks along the rim of this part. Again, trails are built so that you can look from above over various falls - and offers viewpoints with great perspectives.

All in all, the national park of Iguazú (Argentina side) is quite well maintained and leaves a lot of space for activities. It is extremely exciting to walk along the various trails and enjoy all sections of the falls.

Now let's start with the impressions - first with various pictures from the Devil's Throat:

Devil's Throat: From so close, you hear the mighty falls roar - imagine that when looking at the photo!

The mist rising from the falls can be seen from far away - look at the overview photo at the beginning of this posting. Here, you see the origin of this.

Another section of the Devil's Throat - on the other side you see Brazil.

This bridge construction is leading from the Argentina side of the river Iguazú to the Devil's Throat - much opportunity for photos, selfies and contemplation when watching the mighty falls.

I just LOVE catching photos of people taking selfies :-)

As described in my last posting, we started with a boat ride bringing us to the falls from below. Here are two photos from this ride:

Towards the Brazil side, approaching - but not reaching - the Devil's Throat

Getting closer to Argentina with the large variation of smaller (though not less impressive) waterfalls

The sequence of the photos in this blog is not chronological. Let me close this with impressions from our walks along the rim.

Rainbows are wherever waterdrops meet sunshine - you find lots of both in Iguazú and hence will see rainbows all over the place!

Viewpoint ...

... another viewpoint ...

... and a third one.

Waterfall from above - hope you do not suffer form vertigo!

Looking over the falls from above offers fantastic views.

On such trails you reach the different viewpoints - and while walking through the jungle, you see lots of butterflies and might also enjoy the shadow. In Iguazú it is hooooot!

More falls, more green, more mist.

Second weekend: Las Cataratas de Iguazú

It is weekend time again! Eight team members of Los Buenos joined the tour to the Iguazú waterfall, starting on Saturday morning, coming back on Sunday late evening.

Disclaimer: Photos will be following later!

Saturday: After arriving, we checked in to the hotel - as we stayed only one night, we decided to book the Sheraton. This is the only hotel inside the National Park. Hence, all activities within the park can be reached by walking there.

First, we booked a boat tour. By speed boat, they take you to the falls from the lower part of the river. After boarding, the first part shows only the river, but suddenly, the falls got into our view. That was the time for the pictures before putting the camera to the water proof sacks that were provided. After that, the boat went right into the area where the falling water splashes into the river. Shower time!!! With the hot temperature outside and the humidity, this even was a refreshment that was very welcome.

After the boat ride, we took the small train that brings tourists to the Devil's Throat, the part of the falls where you can't get to from below by boat. They constructed trails like bridges on which you can walk close to the rim and take photos.

Our day ended with a pleasant team dinner, full of conversations about the falls and much more. Before falling asleep, we had a look at the stars of the Southern hemisphere.

Sunday: Let me keep this short: Two more hikes with great views and lots and lots of photos today.

Photos will follow in a separate posting  tomorrow! For now, we are cooling down with a beer and a snack before returning to Buenos Aires.

Puerta 18: Continuing our work - update from week 2

Since my last posting, we have been quite busy with our work with the Puerta 18 team. Let me share some aspects.

During our work in the Puerta 18 office, we also have quite some opportunity to observe how they work with the kids. Take the example of the daily activity: It is part of Puerta 18's program to offer one activity per day. The current activities are presented at the "green table", where all kids and coordinators come together. Today, it was Flash animation. The idea was to create an animation of e.g. an animal that is eating some food - the food should move into the animal's mouth. 

Our colleague Rob worked next to one of the kids and followed the instructions of ever-patient and friendly coordinator Stefanie. She really has a great way of breaking down the task into steps that were easy to follow and execute. This task is designed to be achievable within a few hours, so the kids have a successful result at the end. Especially new kids, being at Puerta 18 for the first time, have an easy access to participation here. The general idea is that from here, the kids get to know different technologies and develop their own ideas for projects. They can form teams and collaborate on whatever they like - as long as it has to do with any of the technology aspects that Puerta 18 can offer. The coordinators assist in finding such ideas, building teams, and working on the projects.

For our scope of work, we made quite some progress. Yesterday, we had a Skype call with Kane Milne from High Tech Youth Network in New Zealand. He and Puerta 18 director Federico know each other from Clubhouse Network activities. Puerta 18 is member of this network, and Kane also was active in this network - however, the large distance from New Zealand to any network conferences or meetings that are mostly taking place in the USA, made it very difficult (and expensive!) to participate. He then founded the High Tech Youth Network. For us, this means he has experience with opening new locations and running them - and thus could give us many insights in the resulting tasks and challenges.

We now have to process a lot of information. Our team work changes between group work and breaking down tasks for individual work - so every one of our four team members (not only the three SAP people, but also our project assistant Juan Manuel are fully dedicated and passionate about the project!) can work separately. After some time, we then get back together and review our individual stuff - so everything is aligned and fits together.

One of the tasks was creating a questionnaire for the kids. Rob has a lot of experiences here, as he comes from marketing. Together with Juan Manuel and the Puerta 18 team, he prepared and launched it today - we hope to get further input for the section of our scope of work that will illustrate both the philosophy (including vision and mission) and the success stories - aiming at attracting potential sponsors. The first ten kids already participated, and it already looks promising. During the next weeks, we will continue running this.

Outlook: Starting Saturday morning, eight team members of Los Buenos will be away to Iguazu. The next blog posting will be posted after our return on Sunday evening, so I will probably be able to write again no earlier than Monday. I will then get back to our work with Puerta 18 at the beginning of next week, so expect to learn more about our work on Tuesday or Wednesday.

The green table (look at the photo, and you will understand where the name comes from!): The kids and the coordinators gather to talk about the daily activities

In the middle of the daily activity: Coordinator Stefanie explains how to create a Flash animation - Rob is participating, Janice is watching

Yesterday, we saw the kids creating this overview about breakthrough inventions around communication - today, I am appreciating the result

Back to work: Second week with Puerta 18

The past weekend was full of impressions outside work. Like this, we could "charge the batteries" and get a start into another week full of work on our scope with Puerta 18. Hence, be prepared for an article about our work: Lots of text, almost no photos.

Yesterday was Monday. This weekday is not very busy at Puerta 18, this is why we decided to stay in the hotel and go through the material that we already have and make up our plans on the next steps.

Last Friday, our final activity was to finalize our scope of work description. With this, both the Puerta 18 and our team have confirmed their understanding about what we will deliver at the end of our assignment. These are the five pillars of this agreement: 

1. Provide Puerta 18 with marketing fundamentals on their vision and mission - any new location of Puerta 18 in the future is supposed to follow this vision and mission! 
2. Define a "business syntax" for future presentations to potential sponsors. 
3. Collect as much input as possible and compile it into a toolkit: What are the ingredients and steps for opening a new Puerta 18 location?
4. What are important aspects of running a new location? Again, we will collect input into a toolkit.
5. Provide an overview of all persons that are somehow involved in Puerta 18. Make this visible in order to being able to extract information for the future setup with more locations.

This structure also allowed us to divide the work into several portions. We quickly figured out that we had a problem with distributed information - every team member had separate notes. To centralize this information, we started collaborating on a spreadsheet on Google Drive. This is very convenient, as several people can edit the same document. We quickly started opening tab after tab, filled them and got back to re-arrange the information and also connect the different tabs, e.g. in order to collect the items that we have to do to be displayed automatically in a separate tab, allowing us to track our progress.

One by one, we went through our five pillars and had brainstorming sessions on several of them. In these, we collected many ideas on which we will work during the next days. This sort of work is very intensive - we all started throwing ideas at each other, just to get it picked up and continued by another person!

Today, we were at Puerta 18, but took some time to get into detail work. While Rob was starting refining the marketing fundamentals, and Janice did some research on franchises in general, I worked on the people map. As our starting point was all what we had heard about how Puerta 18 works today, what plans they have and what expectations, we collected our first ideas and started our first design starting from this understanding. Getting back to how franchises (or similar constructions) work and compare it to what we came up with was very helpful: After all, many of our results fitted quite consistently with the results of our research.

This evening, we then had another team meeting in which all four subteams presented their current status. All four presentations had a different focus - also reflecting the different backgrounds of all twelve Los Buenos team members! All four teams had already gone into a great level of detail work - after refining their scope of work. Spending another almost three hours in the evening after a full workday in a team meeting also has some tiring aspects. But this exchange with the other teams is very important to compare the challenges and approaches!

The final and only photo I have for you is from the visit of another Los Buenos team at Puerta 18. They wanted to learn how Puerta 18 works with the kids and see whether there were synergies between this place and their plan to digitalize their client's learning materials.

Today, another of the four SAP Social Sabbatical teams - they are working with Junior Achievement - visited Puerta 18

First weekend in Buenos Aires, Sunday: Walking on my own

On the second day of the weekend, I took some time to walk around on my own. My plan was to get to know the park areas of Palermo and visit the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA).

The day was quite rainy, so I found the parks to be quite empty. While walking and shooting lots of pictures (though not as many as yesterday), I realized one thing: Buenos Aires is crazy about statues! 

There are three types: 

1. Those posing as natural looking motives. Strategy to get nice pictures: Point and click. 

Earlier examples in this blog: Statue within the Teatro Colon.

2. Others in the middle of very busy streets. Strategy to get nice pictures: Wait and hope.

Earlier examples in this blog: Not strictly qualifying here, but probably rather fitting in this second than in the first category is the statue at the Plaza Italia from our first neighborhood walk.

3. The whole place of La Recoleta Cemetery is playing in an own league. Strategy to get nice pictures: Click, click, click, click, ... (only limited by time)

Here are some examples from today for type 1:

The following example may be arguable: Taking it from the other side of the street shows another peculiarity of Buenos Aires: The partly deteriorating structure. You will immediately notice that by using the sidewalks that never are consistent for more than some meters. I owe this perspective to Rob who keeps mentioning that so many things look like the 80s - as if the time has been stopped.

The 80s are represented by the two cars parking as if framing the statue

You have guessed as much, right? Yeah, of course: This is a statue representing type 2

No statue, no type: But the Japanese Garden - I didn't go inside, as the rain was not that inviting. However, I liked this arrangement at the entrance that reminded me of our last year's vacation in Japan.

And as last representative of the statues: Another example for type 1.

The rain was a great reason to get on with the second part of my plan for today: Visit the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). It was opened in 2001 to host the art collection of Eduardo Costantini. The collection is not that large, but it shows a fascinating range of several decades and styles. I really enjoyed the 90-120 minutes that I stayed inside. And of course I am bringing back some impressions for you:

First weekend in Buenos Aires: Volunteering and Sightseeing

This is going to be a looooong posting. Not so much by text, but rather by photos.

The day started with our team participating in volunteer activities: At Fundación Si, we prepared Empanadas (I am using links to avoid the effort of explaining...) that will be given to homeless people. The Fundación people try to establish a bond to the homeless in order to see whether they can be helped out of their situation on the long run. To Janice, Rob, and myself, this sounded quite familiar - we were reminded a lot of what Puerta 18 does: Care for the kids and be interested in them also after they leave the place.

Here are some pictures of this event:

SAP team prepared for the empanada experience

Muhammad as "Chef de Cuisine"

Learning how to fold the empanadas

Carolina handing out lunch: Ñoquis

After our lunch at Fundación Si, a group of six - half of Los Buenos - decided to go for La Recoleta. Cecilia, who also participated in the volunteer activities, lives in that area and went together with us. She explained about the neighborhood and brought us to the world famous cemetery. We separated as a group, so everyone could look around independently - I took 250 pictures today, most of them at this magical place!

Before inviting you to look at some impressions from the cemetery, let me briefly write about the last place we visited today: The "El Ateneo" bookshop that is located in a former theatre. I do recommend reading the Wikipedia article (use the link at the beginning of this sentence) to learn more about it! Here are my impressions:

You could sit down and read in the loge.

View from above - this place was just so fascinating!

And now for the La Recoleta impressions - I will just add the picture, no descriptions provided, let the photos speak for themselves: