Hello everyone!
It's been a while since my last post, so I wanted to update you on what has been happening here in the City of Joy! As you can see in the picture below, we have finally found the perfect place to settle down, the place we will call home for a year (we call it the hive, la ruche en français). After almost a month of intense hunting (we visited more than 50 places in the city!) and negotiating (several times we thought we were really close to signing but the landlords pulled out at the last minute), we found this lovely large old house, where we can have separate office and living spaces, with enough rooms to accommodate all our visitors, and located in a nice, safe and leafy area of Kolkata called Salt Lake City (not a joke).
The other big news is of course that Jess has finally joined me in my Indian adventures, I am now finally complete :-) She arrived on Thursday and is slowly getting used to the heat, the food and the craziness of it all!
It's been a while since my last post, so I wanted to update you on what has been happening here in the City of Joy! As you can see in the picture below, we have finally found the perfect place to settle down, the place we will call home for a year (we call it the hive, la ruche en français). After almost a month of intense hunting (we visited more than 50 places in the city!) and negotiating (several times we thought we were really close to signing but the landlords pulled out at the last minute), we found this lovely large old house, where we can have separate office and living spaces, with enough rooms to accommodate all our visitors, and located in a nice, safe and leafy area of Kolkata called Salt Lake City (not a joke).
The other big news is of course that Jess has finally joined me in my Indian adventures, I am now finally complete :-) She arrived on Thursday and is slowly getting used to the heat, the food and the craziness of it all!
Legend: the International Kolkata team posing in front of the Hive holding the SunKing Solar lights. From left to right: Lauren, our Kiwi / Ozzie Program Coordinator; Tao, the Ozzie / Balinese city co-founder; Boris, your beloved Belgian city co-founder and Jessica, his amazing Canadian wife.
July rings the start of the monsoon, and of Kolkata's first Fellowship Program
Legend: There is a reason why Kolkata is called "the Venice of India" during the monsoon season! This is what a pre-monsoon short shower has done to the street in front of the Hive :-) Fortunately, we were reassured and explained many times by many different people that this type of flooding never happens in Salt Lake City except during the pre-monsoon, since the drains need to be unclogged from the dry season.
As of Monday the first Kolkata Fellowship program starts. During the whole month of July, 10 brave international students and 5 just as brave Indian students will work their assess off to map all the communities in Kolkata and help us recruit Pollinators! I will post again at the end of the program with many pictures and anecdotes of course.
As of Monday the first Kolkata Fellowship program starts. During the whole month of July, 10 brave international students and 5 just as brave Indian students will work their assess off to map all the communities in Kolkata and help us recruit Pollinators! I will post again at the end of the program with many pictures and anecdotes of course.
Chai in India
Legend from left to right: Boris, Tao and Saurav, our amazing Indian intern having a nice cup of chai on the side of a busy street market
As you might have heard, tea is an institution in India. It is traditionally prepared by boiling tea leaves, water, milk, sugar, some more sugar, masala spices and some more sugar all together in a pot, then served in cute little clay pots. I love it! Some fund facts about tea I have discovered the other day at a tea place in the centre:
- Tea was accidentally discovered by a Chinese emperor who was sitting beneath a tree waiting for his water to boil when leaves fell into his pot.
- Tea is the second most consumed drink in the world, second only to water.
- 25% of the world's tea production is consumed in India.
- Tea bags were invented in America in the early 1800s, and were initially used to hold samples of teas brought from India. Today, 96% of all cups of tea served around the world were made using teabags.
- Tea leaves are a natural means of keeping mosquitoes away. All you have to do is use slightly damp leaves to add the scent of tea to the areas you want to keep insect-free.
Setting up a house in India is something different
Legend: the locksmith, that we hailed on the street, is making doubles for our house keys. No need for those machines we have in Europe, these guys use their expert eyes, a hammer, chisel and sander to do the job! From left to right: Tao, Jess, Julie (Pollinate Energy's finance manager, who came down to Kolkata for a month to help us with the set up), and the two locksmiths.
As you may have noticed by now, a lot of things are done very differently in India, which makes it very interesting for us Westerners set in our ways, and makes up for nice and sometimes very funny experiences! Bureaucracy is something else as well, for example getting a gas connection requires 8 copies of your passport, as many passport sized pictures of yourself, a notarized copy of your lease agreement and the name and address of your father (this is only a slight exaggeration). Getting a SIM card requires the same set of documents and an Indian reference on top of that. If the Indian reference is not from the state you are in, it won't work. If your signature doesn't match EXACTLY what is on your passport (I'm talking from experience here), it won't work. And then when you have all of that, sometimes it just doesn't work at all for some obscure reason (right, Tao?).
As you may have noticed by now, a lot of things are done very differently in India, which makes it very interesting for us Westerners set in our ways, and makes up for nice and sometimes very funny experiences! Bureaucracy is something else as well, for example getting a gas connection requires 8 copies of your passport, as many passport sized pictures of yourself, a notarized copy of your lease agreement and the name and address of your father (this is only a slight exaggeration). Getting a SIM card requires the same set of documents and an Indian reference on top of that. If the Indian reference is not from the state you are in, it won't work. If your signature doesn't match EXACTLY what is on your passport (I'm talking from experience here), it won't work. And then when you have all of that, sometimes it just doesn't work at all for some obscure reason (right, Tao?).
And then there's all the little challenges that you have to deal with when you furnish a house that makes it so much fun :-). Most of these are due to misunderstandings because we don't speak the language, and we have such a different way of doing things that there is often a mismatch. Beds that are delivered that are 15 cm smaller than what you ordered (apparently they are so used to making their double beds square that they didn't even look at the measurements we gave them), the AC guy who has been saying he will come today since last week, although we call him everyday, the electrician who fixes the fan too close to the wall so that when we turn it on it hits the wall every time, etc. etc.
But in the midst of all that, there are so many little wins everyday, and things that you expect will take so much longer than foreseen (like getting some shelves done) will happen in an hour because the carpenter thought of something we would have never thought of for example. And bunk beds will be delivered the day before our first fellow arrives (see picture below of the whole team assembling them). And the house manager, who we had doubts about when hiring and can't speak any English, is so smiley and we all fell in love with her after she cooked us her first meal. And the number of applications we have received for our local co-founder positions is so high and the applications have so much experience that we have the luxury to be able to pick and chose and offer the job to awesome people who are ready to give up a career in a well-known MNC and a much higher salary to work with us because they believe in the project. Or our landlady who we discovered has had an amazing life and keeps coming up with furniture to give us and new ways to help us and who invites us with a huge smile to come in and sit down whenever we go by her door. She got married off at 16 before finishing school from a low class family, had her first kids at 18, her second at 20, her third at 21, and then decided to start her studies again all the way to a PhD in law and is now a well-respected advocate (understand lawyer) in Kolkata.
In short, I love my India :-)
But in the midst of all that, there are so many little wins everyday, and things that you expect will take so much longer than foreseen (like getting some shelves done) will happen in an hour because the carpenter thought of something we would have never thought of for example. And bunk beds will be delivered the day before our first fellow arrives (see picture below of the whole team assembling them). And the house manager, who we had doubts about when hiring and can't speak any English, is so smiley and we all fell in love with her after she cooked us her first meal. And the number of applications we have received for our local co-founder positions is so high and the applications have so much experience that we have the luxury to be able to pick and chose and offer the job to awesome people who are ready to give up a career in a well-known MNC and a much higher salary to work with us because they believe in the project. Or our landlady who we discovered has had an amazing life and keeps coming up with furniture to give us and new ways to help us and who invites us with a huge smile to come in and sit down whenever we go by her door. She got married off at 16 before finishing school from a low class family, had her first kids at 18, her second at 20, her third at 21, and then decided to start her studies again all the way to a PhD in law and is now a well-respected advocate (understand lawyer) in Kolkata.
In short, I love my India :-)