Cooking a la chino and a lil bit about my job

So here in Rotterdam, I live in a flat with 6 other project collaborators. They are pretty cool and they are all really nice when it comes to cooking and sharing food. Among these 6 individuals, there is a mechatronics engineer from China, lets call him Q. Q is really nice and makes really good food (his rice with pork is AWESOME), it was because of him and and my other housemates that I decided to try cooking something chino today. Q showed me how to use his rice cooker before he left for Denmark so today I put myself up to the challenge to make some white rice with pork, eggs and onion.

Here is my odyssey in pictures!










The end result was a partial success, the rice was not as good as Q's (obviously) I actually had to cook it for more time because it was undercooked, but after the second half-cycle it was eatable. Hopefully by the end of the summer I'll have the technique down and make some good chino food in the weekends at MIT.

Apart from that, today was a pretty average day. In my job, we continued making some boat prototypes and I learned a lot about sailmaking which will be very useful when we build the final prototype of the boat...I just realized I haven't really talked abut my job too much so I'll elaborate on it a bit.

I work in the "Protei" initiative, Protei's goal is to develop a fleet of autonomous oil cleaning sailing robots. This summer we are building the first "full scale" Protei (about 6m long). The project is totally open source so anyone can contribute (YES even YOU can contribute by checking out protei.org and giving feedback on designs and stuff), there are engineers, industrial designers, oceanographers, naval architects all collaborating in the project. However the "Protei Core team" is about 8-9 of us here in Rotterdam and a lot of our collaborators are scattered all over the world (Chile, Italy, Norway, US, France and more) so we are responsible for coordinating everything and keeping the website up-to-date so people can watch almost in real time what we do and give us feedback. (if you are interested in the project and have more questions, don't doubt to contact me).

So far in the last three weeks we have done a lot of setting up the workspace and a lot of brainstorming and prototyping on many design concepts for the boat. I am the "Marine Engineer" so I mainly work with the Naval Architects in Chile making sure all the decisions (length, beam, draft, sail area, rigging, keel etc) are in accordance to Naval Architecture principles. I also maintain myself involved in the electronics group and help out with the fabrication. I'll have more to say about my job as the summer progresses.

But yep, that was my day today, work, cooking and lots of blogging!

Paz y Amor,

-R