2015 - April 22, Strait to Taiwan
From ATS Wiki
Contents |
Event Captains
- Food (Tian Mi)
- Decorations (David Wong)
- Booths (Cynthia Lo, Jimmy Zeng)
- Logistics (Julia Huang)
Event Overview
Another year of ATS's famed Strait to Taiwan =). This year we continued using the built wooden stands. We removed Xifan sunday from last year, and had about 10 people helping out at any given time. It helped a lot that we focused on two things at a time to prep for so people had company and we were working in basically two circles of 5-8.
2015 Shopping List
Food/Shopping List
DO NOT BUY THESE THINGS NEXT YEAR
- aluminum foil -- we have like sq yards that will probably last 20 years. We're not joking.
- chicken skewers -- we have a LOT left in storage so you probably won't need to buy them (double check before shopping trip)
- glutinous rice flour -- we have a lot in storage -- check before you buy!
- tea leaves -- we have one or two bags in Walker
(you should check out the two boxes in walker for S2T)
Attendance
Ticket sales were around $
Notes
Contacts
- CAC Stata: Lianne Scott (liscott@mit.edu)
- Campus Dining: Michael (Mike) Myers (myersm@mit.edu)
- Electricity: Bob 617-771-5083 (emailing Lianne Scott takes care of this)
- Tech Cash: Card Services, Basement of Student Center
- Make sure to reserve the card reader VERY early in advance! It's new and easy to use.
- Tim the Beaver: http://studentlife.mit.edu/cac/forms/reserve-tim http://studentlife.mit.edu/cac/forms/reserve-tim
Driver's Guide
- Dont drive on Marathon Monday. There are alternatives. ie. HMart and Super 88
- Zipcar is good for short trips but if keeping it for over 6 hours, might want to consider renting it for the day or using budget car.
- If using budget car, get codes from MIT to get car without satisfying age requirement
- May want to look into Uhaul for large shopping trips
- Shuttling equipment for prep/cleanup
- Walker
- Parking at Walker next to tennis courts
- If comfortable, can actually back down slope to use unloading area for kitchen.
- Otherwise, side door near parking lot gives easy access to elevator. Dont leave door open for long though. Door has silent alarm that alerts police if left open for a long time.
- Student Center
- Can stop in the circle Saferide uses. Might be safer to have driver sit in car though because you cant actually park there for long.
- McCormick
- Only 30 min parking without a parking pass. Best to leave someone with the car in case someone comes to ticket the car. (BIG No-No)
- Word out is McCormick desk called MIT Police on van sitting outside McCormick for a couple hours. Dont do that.
- Walker
- Chinatown Run
- Took the T there and ubered back
- Costco Run
- Have someone look for a route online and print it out beforehand to minimize stress
- Mobile version of google maps takes you on a road that doesnt exist, hence stress and confusion
- Lots of splitting roads. Directions will probably just tell you to go straight. It is ok to stop in the center of the split and figure out where to go. U-turns are hard to come by.
- Shuttling food/equipment day of
- UHAUL opens at 7. Be there and wait for them to open to maximize set-up time.
- Parked at shaws because closer parking garages were full.
Logistics
- Reservation issues this year - none
- got Tim the Beaver, make sure to reserve at least 2 weeks in advance
- no Girl Scouts yay!
- CAC and Dining people have real lives, sometimes emails may get back with a “OUT OF OFFICE” response, make sure to contact them during the weekday and between 9am and 5pm
- Reserving Stata
- Fill out the "Student Space Application." Also contact Lianne directly about reserving the space.
- Need to fill out an official event description on the MIT event calendar because we get funding
- In addition to reserving the space, you need to register the event at atlas.mit.edu
- Meeting with Campus Dining - we met with Michael Myers
- Asked for - tablecloths, serving utensils, ice. Got disposal tablecloths at 8:30 (postponed setup because of that) we should still have them in storage. He offered to get us serving utensils but we had enough. No ice because Chartwells only has 1 ice machine that services all three food places in Stata
- TechCASH Machine
- Reserve the TechCASH machine ASAP, much earlier than two weeks before. TechCASH machine is beautiful (also you get a free iPhone with it, borrowed only)
- Publicity
- Let Pub Chairs know early! This year we had a page in the tech and some ads down the infinite, but dorm postering was only half done and our cover pictures were all changed super late.
- Other Logistics
- Lianne got us nice easels and helped us contact the electricity people. Send her the layout plans. She'll want to know how many easels we want, what appliance wattages are.
- Electrical has historically cost between $550 and $600. Remember to include in the budget. In 2013, the cost was nearly $1000.
Volunteers
- Have a laptop at the front booth to let volunteers sign in
- We paid volunteers 2 tickets/hr. Serving is more important than prep because you need the coverage
- Serving shifts: 1hr, Prep shifts: come whenever you can
- Pay volunteers at booth on day of
Food
- TIAN ROCKED FOOD CAPTAINING (if you're not experienced, probably a good idea to have more than one food captain). Even if you're reusing recipes, it takes a lot of work to plan the logistics of cooking.
- Chicken Skewers
- Make more of them. Like, even more. They're cheap, easy, and delicious. ("Why didn't we get 10 bags??")
- We also lost a whole box of chicken skewers ._.
- We initially sold at 1 for $1, but later sold 3 for $2 -- Don't sell them at the reduced price ever.
- Sellout: 1:12pm
- Zong Zi
- Video of Steph Yu teaching how to make zongzi is here.
- We had wayyyyyy more tea leaves than we could make zongzi -- we had to throw a lot out.
- Amount of rice to filling ratio was off and we ran out of sticky rice -- Steph Yu saved the day and fried some rice with the filling that we filled the zong zi's with
- MAKE SURE YOU LABEL VEGGIE AND MEAT CAREFULLY -- some meat ones ended up in the veggie bag and that was very embarassing
- Pork Rice
- Get smaller bowls, pork rice went fast
- Think out the pork to rice ratio more carefully (i.e. measure how big the spoon is; not too hard to do)
- Scallion Pancakes
- We ran out of flour -- went through ~40 lbs of flour, and 100 sq feet of parchment paper
- Line is forever -- we ended up repurposing veggie dumplings hot plate for scallion pancakes
- Good idea to have 3 skillets for scallion pancakes -- might need to rethink layout
- Dumplings
- Frozen dumplings from Chinatown are just as cheap as dumplings from Costco, but taste like 10x better. However, they need to be cooked in water; they cannot be simply fried. Consider an additional hot plate at the dumpling station (this means the electrical layout needs to get changed!)
- We accidentally got mini won ton dumplings at Costco this year, but people still bought them...
- Tea Eggs
- Went pretty well; there are complete tea egg tea/seasoning boxes in Chinatown, those were pretty useful (though you might want to add a little more sugar and soy sauce)
- Shaved Ice
- Bring can openers... It's easy to forget about Shaved Ice since it doesn't require prep beforehand, but don't!
- we made mini mochi with extra powder from mochi!
- Mochi
- DON'T MAKE SO MUCH MOCHI. IT WAS TOO MUCH FOR US. We ended up selling at 5 for $1 or something ridiculous when everything else sold out.
- Halve the amounts that we used last year
- We have a shit ton of the glutinous rice powder left over from this year and last year
Non-food
- Calligraphy -- seemed popular enough
- Pachinko -- originally not enough volunteers so left unmanned on the side
- Later brought back next to calligraphy and it was slightly more popular
- Lion Dance -- they accidentally gave us one less booth so lion dance got kinda shafted (sorry keving and david ._.)
Decorations
- DUCT TAPE -- MAKE SURE YOU HAVE IT
- used the stands and the easels because of lack of tape
Other
- Unpredictables happen! This year we had struggles loading at next because the f***ing police were trying to prevent us from stopping there for a bit to load and unload. Other than that, seemed pretty not bad.
