Unreasonable at Sea day 62 – 63: back to Kochi
I went to Jaaga first thing in the morning and met Yashas who runs Hackteria.
I also met Ron who is an artist in residence at Shrishti funded by the goethe-institut, from Berlin.
Then I went to lunch at a Korean restaurant, tried to go to SP road but most of the electronics shops were closed, so I returned to Jaaga to meet up with Archana. Meanwhile, a start up festival / meetup was occurring at Jaaga, where there were a lot of guys who I had met at the start up festival.
Later on the way back to the hotel I passed by FABINDIA and then met Min and Minh at the hotel and together made our way to Punjabi by Nature where the rest of the Unreasonable team was meeting, and already eating.
After eating, we went back to the Service Center and caught a night bus headed to Kochi, at 10:30. We arrived at 7:30 in the morning back in Kochi, at the port. That day in Kochi I ate breakfast and then we went around Kochi by bike.
First we picked up the package of sweatshirts and tee shirts, sitting at the JM BAXI Post Center from ALMA MATER that we had ordered, then we went “shopping” in Fort Cochin, where we met Modi, Kashe, Shira and Taylor. We went back to Fabindia then another store. Then we ate a delicious lunch.
Then we took the ferry to the mainland and went to the store where Cesar had visited the first day in Kochi, where Cesar had later purchased resin and epoxy, catalyst and accelerator. But he was disallowed to bring it on board the MV explorer without proper documentation so we returned and got paper documentation of each chemical. It took a LONG while while to get print outs of the test reports from each chemical. Probably around 2 hours. We were getting angry and a bit impatient.
Then we head to purchase the remaining items, aluminum rods for the mast, tupperware containers for holding the nano-filler beads that were just packed in a cardboard box and would fly everywhere, etc.
We realized that we were running late and SPED across Kochi to the bike rental place, then head back in a TUkTUk to the port. We arrived in time but unfortunately, when we returned to the MV explorer, we were not allowed to bring ANY of these items on board, so the entire afternoon’s worth of equipment gathering was fruit-less.
We had dinner then had a town hall meeting, welcoming returning folks : tom clayton, ben from Nike Foundation, Laura Edwards back from TED LA, Modi from Damascus Fortune… and one new learning partner from Microsoft. Then we did some work and before sleeping, we tried on our sweatshirts and tee shirts.
We had a meeting via Skype with Scott from Dragon Innovations, and learned that they actually act as what represents the “manufacturing intermediary company” for us, and they work with companies from all over the world who are manufacturing, in China. They also provide a design review process, which I am specifically curious about learning more about what this entails for Protei.
And here are a few more photos from the Kerala start up village event from Cesar’s photo stream: