The Sweet Service Award goes to Huguenot Fine Chocolates, the oldest chocolate manufacturer in Franschhoek. They completed wrapping Easter eggs for an order for our Whale Cottage Franschhoek guests within half an hour of placing the order, even though we would have been happy to collect them the following day. We were able to choose the colours of the foil wrapping of the eggs too, to match our colour scheme. The chocolate eggs tasted delicious, quite unlike the commercial eggs which were available in retail outlets. Continue reading →
Tag Archives: V&A
WhaleTales Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines: 10 January
Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines
* South Africa has three entries on The Daily Beast‘s 12 best travel places to visit in 2014: the Bascule Bar at the Cape Grace hotel; the Kwandwe Private Game Reserve; and wine tasting at Groot Constantia. The American website has 15 million unique visitors per month!
* Another hotel is to be built in the V&A Waterfront, described by the retail development as a ‘mid-market, internationally branded hotel‘, according to the SA Tourism website, which erroneously wrote in his headline: ‘New hotel slated (sic) for V&A‘! The V&A claims to receive 24 million visitors per year (without explaining how this number is measured), and to have contributed R200 billion to the country’s GDP in the past ten years! The retail and entertainment area already has six 5 star, two 4 star, and two 3 star hotels.
* Solar storms are expected, and could influence GPS settings, power grids, and airline and military communications.
* Qantas is the safest airline in the world, out of 448 monitored. The other safest airlines are Air New Zealand, All Nippon Continue reading →
World Design Capital 2014: Highlights for Cape Town!
There has been little information about what to expect for next year when Cape Town takes over the honour of being World Design Capital (WDC) 2014, from 1 January onwards. The theme for Cape Town is ‘Live Design, Transform Life‘.
An article in Mercedes-Benz magazine provides a short summary of the ten projects chosen by World Design Capital 2014 operating company Cape Town Design NPC CEO Alyne Reesberg. She is a dynamic personality, having worked as a relationship manager at Microsoft previously. She says her vision for the important design year is to ‘make visible and tangible the many life-altering innovations that are being fostered‘ in Cape Town. She also wants to incorporate our continent of Africa into the design discussion, and wants it to continue beyond 2014.
Reesberg believes that Cape Town’s design focus will attract more businesses to the Mother City, to offer employment to locals, and to utilise our city’s infrastructure. She also hopes that tourists will visit next year, to also experience ‘the incredible ingenuity, know-how and capability’, which seem intangibles which will be hard for them to experience! She would like to see the legacy of Cape Town as World Design Capital 2014 as ‘an absolute must-see for people who are interested in how design can improve citizens’ lives‘.
The ten top design projects for 2014, according to Reesberg, are the following: Continue reading →
iFix Sweet Service and V&A Waterfront Sour Service Awards!
The Sweet Service Award goes to iFix and their technician Theodore Ellis, who assisted with a problem when I could not get the photographs on my iPhone to download onto my laptop. Theodore assisted me immediately when I arrived, tested the phone and the laptop, and suggested that there may be too many photographs on the phone (MasterChef SA being to blame!). I spent an hour deleting about 1000 photographs, and was relieved when the download worked fine in time for the Finale of MasterChef SA last Wednesday. He did Continue reading →