Strait To Taiwan

From ATS Wiki

Latest revision as of 23:26, 5 August 2017

Event Links

• 2017 - April 19, Strait to Taiwan
• 2014 - April 23, Strait to Taiwan
• 2013 - April 17, Strait to Taiwan
• 2012 - April 9, Strait to Taiwan
• 2011 - April 20, Strait to Taiwan
• 2010 - April 27, Strait to Taiwan
• 2009 - Strait to Taiwan
• 2008 - Strait to Taiwan

Event Description

Strait to Taiwan is an event designed to bring the MIT community to the beautiful, boisterous country of Taiwan…without leaving the campus. The event is set in the middle of the day, our venue being the hallways of Stata where the hundreds of students, staff, and faculty can see and partake in the festivities as if they were in the middle of one of the many famous, lively markets in Taipei, Taiwan.

Student-made wooden booths line the hallways with bright neon colored signs displaying Chinese advertisements, beautiful hand-drawn pictures of delicious foods, and silly slogans to amuse as people walk by. Those who aren’t drawn in by the intricate origami, lanterns, and hand painted signs are definitely lured in by the wafts of mouth-watering Taiwanese snacks filling Stata Street.

Asian snacks that would be typically served in a market in Taiwan such as dumplings, fried noodles, oyster pancakes, almond tofu, shaved ice, Chinese sausages, fish balls, summer rolls, and many more are the main attraction of the event. Nearly everything is homemade by our dedicated students (with authentic recipes! And for more than 1000 people), and everything only costs $1 each- just as cheap as the streets of Taiwan!

Mahjong sets sit nearby for people who want to sit down for a game and some food. Tim the beaver walks around making funny Asian poses and taking pictures with the many excited students. Large laminated posters of Taiwanese attractions interweave with bright red lanterns that are strung up to emulate the landscapes and city surroundings in Taiwan.

All of these together- the delicious, cheap, but hearty snacks, the bright decorations, and the lively people…all of these give everyone at MIT a chance to see what exactly it’s like to go Strait to Taiwan.

See pictures at Strait to Taiwan

Notes

Logistics Checklist

Volunteer Email: 1-2 weeks prior to event (We had signups for decoration preparation, signups for food preparation, and signups for food. Two hours of preparation or one hour of booth during the event was equivalent to 3 food tickets for volunteer. We used a google form to recruit volunteers. This allowed us to see how many people we had during each hour. It also gave us the freedom to send them to any booth that needed help during the event. However, it was suggested that a separate wiki get setup so that volunteers can signup for the specific booths they work at.)

Publicity: 1-2 weeks prior to event. Here are all the pub options (do as many as possible!)

• emails
• Facebook event
• Chalking
• 11x17 color posters (from Copytech)
• Infinite Connection (the projectors along the Infinite)
• Advertisement in the Tech

TechCash: 2 weeks prior to event though we were able to get it 3 days before the event (Just go to the card office in the basement of the student center. It costs $5 to rent the machine. If they don't have the machine available, they'll give you forms to fill out instead.)

Tim the Beaver: rent from CAC 1 week prior or earlier to get confirmation (Go online and fill out the form, and the have someone do the online training and turn in their form to CAC office in 5th floor student center. use Tim to get people to the ticket booth! Also let people take pictures with Tim.)

Stata Reservation: Contact CAC. Our direct contact was Lianne Scott (liscott@mit.edu). She'll ask you how many tables/booths you want and what your layout looks like. She also wants a description of the event and what activities you'll have other than food. Finally, make sure you talk to her about electricity because we always blow out our power. She also gave us extension cords and powerstrips. Get contact of facilities just in case. Last year Lianne said she would get us a spiderbox, but on the day of, the electricians said they couldn't hook one up in Stat. Instead, the electricians were on call all day, which worked out fine. We also found that only 2 microwaves are needed at most, and 1 is sufficient for most of the day.

Campus Dining Meeting: Contact Michael Myers <myersm@mit.edu>. He'll go over food safety with you. Just remember that you'll need to keep hot food hot and cold food cold. Ask him about how to obtain ice, hot water, and a food incubator. Anything containing meat (especially raw meat) really needs to be kept cold during the event, so it might help to bring extra aluminum trays and make ice baths for the trays containing food. Gloves are also required. Meat thermometers are also important. We never deep fry things because apparently one year we were doing that and ended up needing a fire extinguisher

Event Registration Form: must be submitted 5 days before the event (wheeee atlas.mit.edu ! we generally say cash will exchange hands and that we need a cashbox but just never end up reserving and it works out fine.)

events.mit.edu: make sure to add an event to this calendar. we need to do it for LEF/ARCADE purposes. It should be fairly straight forward, though I'm not sure who actually has access to add to the calendar.

Decorations: We made brand new decorations this year (2009) for all our foods and desserts, and for drinks. We also have a new sign for ATS and a crafts sign. There is lots and lots of cellophane left over and we still have some black posterboard (60 inches long). This year, we made them by printing out letters, cutting around the letters by leaving 2-3 inches of space, cutting out the letter so we only have the outline, and then gluing the letter onto cellophane and the cellophane onto white paper. We then put these letters on the black boards. This was a lot more time consuming than last year when we just purchased white boards and cut the letters out on black construction paper and glued it to cellophane and the white board. (You need white as backing for the cellophane). We spent lots and lots of time on our boards though so please reuse them in the future!!!!!! Materials were purchased at pearl.

Treasurer Notes: See Image:S09 arcade straittotaiwan.pdf

Performance Notes

Performances can only be held during class change (so between xx:55 and xx:05) so they won't disturb classes that go on in Stata. We rented A/V from MIT A/V. Though performances are fun, not too much attention was given to them because we could only spare our volunteers to let them perform during less busy hours.

Food Notes

We had an idea of making a recipe book to sell and/or a guide to our food. What we ended up doing was a guide to our event with a diagram of the booths and where each food was located.