Oh well, it was still quite clement (thanks to Bubba Watson for that synonym) when we all decided to go into the city for some last minute shopping for presents and what not.

My morning was decidedly ruined when I saw jeans for $20 that looked furtively like the pair I had bought the day before for $100, but I pushed through to get some shoes. Yay. Flagged a taxi to get home with minutes to spare. Yay again.

The reason we had to be home was because we had to get to Candlestick Park by 1:30pm.

We were about to experience the jungle that was American football, and there is nothing that compares. The stadium is a great concrete monolith that just sort of sits there and sweats dryness and throbs in the sun. Then stretching from its bases in all directions are barren asphalt plains, hot black desert covered by chunky metal SUVs, silver bull bars glistening. And between all this aching metal filters tiny little fleshy bodies, grunting and chanting and bellowing at each other, scratching themselves, exhaling ridiculous amounts of beer.

It was surreal, kind of like Mad Max’s Thunderdome, in its urban grunginess. It was a huge change from the yacht club, and subsequently everyone, though intimidated, was appreciative of the experience because it meant we had been to the two extremes of society, put out of our comfort zone so to speak. (Oddly, I felt far more at home at the football than I did at the Yacht Club, which shows the true subjectiveness of the term ''comfortable''.)

This has been a major theme of this trip actually, stretching and extending ourselves and learning about things that potentially opposed each other, Sven’s small-business to global corporations for example, which was done in order to give us a view of the whole spectrum of the corporate world, which was greatly appreciated because we were trusted to take the raw information and make the inferences ourselves, rather than being force-fed pre-determined ''life lessons'' and sagacious wisdom.

Tomorrow is our last day in the US, before 20 hours of travelling. Maybe that heatwave will send us off.

Maybe.