Blade Edge

The day started off bright, sunny and clear – visibility wise at least. You usually can’t see Taipei 101 and the mountains so well this early in the day

Managed to roll out of bed at 6:45 today, so was able to do a quick check on the computer and grab a more substantial breakfast than yesterday, which was good because I needed it to get through today. While a new crew shipped out to Taipei 101 I was back at Dajia working on clearing out the product tent once again because we now had to convert the space into the workshop that would be constructing the props to which we will be attaching fireworks and that will then be hung up along all four faces of Taipei 101 from like the 30th to the 91st floor. So there was a lot of shuffling around the heavy cake boxes onto palettes that could then be lifted with a forklift and taken out of the way. This took all morning.

Forklifting around a crapton of product for both the Dajia and Taipei 101 sites

Just before lunch the weather started to take a turn for the worse, and we had to stop loading pallets and rush to cover up any exposed boxes that were sitting around on pallets outside a container, which was a lot by then. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, it doesn’t really rain hard or a lot out here this time of year, so the precipitation never was more than a heavy drizzle – it just went on for several hours and eventually we had water creeping into the production tent and product/shop tent. Luckily neither are in areas that cause water to pool up significantly.

The day’s fair weather takes a turn for the worse as the rain clouds move in

By now though we had succeeded at getting the tent outfitted for prop making and moved inside the Big Show workers who had already begun the process of creating them. Then several Grucci techs stepped in (including myself) to help move things along. I can’t go into specifics about the props, but they require several stages of assembly before they are completed and ready for boxing so they can be trucked over to 101. I mainly helped with late-stage assembly, taking care of the last few things needed before a prop was completed and ready for testing before being boxed up. The assembly process is rather complicated and a bit convoluted, so there is a lot of double-checking that goes on and I had to backtrack assembly a bit to fix some problems I discovered in the props I was working on. I also messed up a few props and had to go back and redo stuff when I realized it.

The product tent converted once again – this time to a prop assembly workshop

We spent the whole afternoon into the early evening assembling enough props to put up on all 4 faces on one level of the building. We still have 7 more levels to go of four sides each 😛 Those have been started, just not completed. We’ve also worked out a lot of the kinks in the assembly process so that by the end of the day people better understood what they were doing and so things were moving along much better. We rolled on in production until 6pm again tonight. The hardest part about the prop assembly (in the final stages) is that you really can’t do it while sitting down, and you are bending over a lot at a table barely higher than your waist, so not only do your feet get tired, but your back starts to ache as well after a while.

Seafood hot pot!

After work today I went out with a few people to a hot pot restaurant around the block from the hotel. This one was a little different from what I was expecting, but still very interesting. So instead of the central cooking bowl, we all got our own. I chose the seafood bowl and received a pot with crab meat, shrimp, noodles, clams, lettuce, pork, dumpling, egg and other stuff I can’t really remember the names of but tasted good – it wasn’t all to my liking of course (the blood cake wasn’t very appetizing) but I slurped up a good portion of it. It was only about $3.50 USD for the meal too. Many thanks to Orophin, one of our translators, for making the trip into the city to join us for hot pot and letting us know exactly how to do it and what we were eating – although sometimes she refused to tell us exactly what it was until after we tried it because she figured we wouldn’t if we knew, hahaha. In most cases she was right!

Tomorrow I’m supposed to be back assembling props at Dajia, but there’s also talk of me maybe getting pulled back over to 101. So we shall see!

Oh and isn’t there something special about tomorrow or something?