Day 18. Wednesday. Oct 21.

Llamas
Llamas are native to South America. They are very intelligent animals. They are used as working animals, for meat and their wool.
Here is how they look:

---- I feel a bit like this llama because I'm feeling a bit under the weather and tired.

Day 18. We worked from the hotel meeting room today. It was a very productive day with a lot of progress on deliverables like web store, product BOMs, projections tool, strategy document, etc.

We picked Georg's brain on product launch processes and best practices. We had a team meeting at 6:30 PM and after that Orchids planned a potluck dinner.

I decided to skip the team potluck. So I don't have pictures to post :o). Nevetheless, I look forward to getting at least 9 hours of sleep ;) and hopefully feel rested.

Day 17. Tuesday. Oct 20.

Statistics

Here are some statistics of my blog. The audience spans 10 different countries in 4 continents! Overall, 1000+ views. That's really cool. Thank you all for your support!

Day 17. Another good day at work. Tracey confirmed that we will be doing another field visit. This time, we will be visiting a woman producer called Rosalba in Subachoque town, 1.5 hours from Bogota. Looking forward to this experience. 

Week 3: Day 16. Monday. Oct 19.

"Viva Colombia!"
.. is the perfect ice-breaker phrase which can be used anywhere in Colombia- pubs, hotel, restaurants, grocery stores, taxis, etc. Guaranteed way to make friends for life.

Day 16. Wow, week 3 already. Good thing is we are really cruising in terms of delivering the promised tools and enhancements for PSF. Today we planned to demo the first set of deliverables to Diego and Sindy. We spent the first half of the day demoing the first iteration of the tools and processes to Diego and Sindy. I feel they were very happy with the result but of course they wanted to test the tools.

We spent the afternoon with Mathieu demoing the other tools we built for him. We even worked with Mathieu to create and design a trial version webstore on Shopify. This was really cool as we could see the products on a fully functional live webstore, accessible online. Just to set the context, currently PSF receives orders from customers via telephones, emails or google forms. Payments are made through bank transfer or cash. We recognized, quite early, that these archaic methods need to be changed, especially if PSF wants to scale to other cities (and even countries)!

In the evening, we planned a PSF team potluck at Nico Apartments. We grabbed a few things from the supermarket and waited for our guests/clients.
Guess who showed up? Juan Forero! What a surprise! We were really happy that Juan decided to attend our potluck. We were meeting him for the first time. A very captivating gentleman with whom we connected instantly. We spoke for a long time about our involvement with PSF and our work so far. He was spellbound by our achievements ( :o) Juan, if you disagree, please leave a comment below :D ). We mentioned to Juan, how impressed we were with the PSF team's commitment and worth ethics.
Meanwhile, the PSF colleagues (youngsters) cooked some awesome crepes, guacamole and veggies. Sindy made some delicious fried plantain scoops.
We had a great time with the team.

Sindy and Francios.

Juan.

Day 15. Sunday. Oct 18.

Day 15. We decided to take it easy today. We did a local trip to a famous flea market in the center of Bogota.


Georg being helped by a vendor to wear a poncho.

Poncho Villa. 

Divi buying some local music cds. 

We enjoyed some corn on the street. Reminded me of Bangalore.

Michal bought some nice paintings. 

Back in the hotel, I spent a couple of hours working as I had lost some time on Friday. I spent another quiet evening in the room watching Colts Patriots game while enjoying an ice cream. Tomorrow we get to present the deliverables to Diego, Sindy and Mathieu for the first time. Also we have a potluck/dinner planned with the PSF team.
PSF team introduced themselves to us couple of weeks ago. All of them (except Sindy) said they have 2 hobbies: Cooking and Dancing. (So I really look forward to having these great cooks in my kitchen :) )..... Sindy has 1 additional one -  Smiling! (Never heard this before!). I don't blame her though.

Sindy and Theo.

Day 14. Saturday. Oct 17

Not A.G.A.I.N.

Rene and Sabrina.

Day 14. Really looking forward to the Coffee Plantation visit. The bus was already waiting, by the time I reached the lobby. After a quick breakfast, we jumped into the bus and headed to Fusagasuga, a small town 2 hours south west of Bogota. The guided coffee tour in Hacienda Coloma was 90 minutes long. The drive to the plantation was beautiful! 

We were greeted by a very friendly but huge dog, Munyesa, who gave me a huge hug.

I'm not going into the full process of coffee making but here are the high level steps:

1. Coffee plants take around 18 months to become productive. Once they are productive they can be harvested for 25 years.

2 .Coffee beans harvested when they are red/orange. 

3. Each employee harvests around 140 kilos of coffee seeds a day. Out of that 87% is thrown away during quality check. Which leaves them with 18.2 kilos a day of productive coffee seeds.

4. These coffee seeds are then put in a tank and cleaned with running water where the pulp of the seed is removed from the beans.

5. The coffee beans are then sun dried. 

6. The outer skin of the beans are then removed to expose the green coffee beans! These green beans are then exported internationally. 

7. The green beans are then dried in a large dryer. 

8. Another step of quality check is done to separate good beans from the bad ones. The bad ones are the coffee beans used to make coffee in Colombia. The good ones are exported.

9. The good beans are then roasted at regulated temperature to make them dark brown. 

10. The roasted beans are then cooled by spraying water.

11. The roasted bean are then ground into coffee powder!

Oh, the SMELL !!! 

Interesting facts:

1. Light and medium blends are the way to go because they are made from good coffee.

2. Dark coffee is good only for espressos. 

3. Coffee beans that are black are not good quality. 

4. Starbucks recently made their appearance in Colombia. The government of Colombia gave them permission only on the basis that they will source the coffee from Colombia. 

Green beans:

Rene messing around: 

Sorting the good coffee beans from the bad ones.

FINAL PRODUCT! Freshly brewed coffee - in real real time! 

After doing some souvenir shopping, we headed back to Bogota. 

We stopped by at the Plaza de Bolivar and took some photos.

There are some crazy street performers in Bogota. We saw a couple of guys juggling machetes, a mummy, and a girl doing somersaults on another girls head!

Spent some quiet time in the evening to reflect on the last couple of weeks and also got some good sleep.