Land of the Rising Mickey
Page 2 of 5
Hiro told me he'd heard that starting tomorrow we'll be doing our Radio Exercises and assembly someplace a lot closer to our changing room and my work area! They'll be in this big dock area that will be considered "backstage" when the park opens. It's right between Tokyo Disneyland's big service buildings and the building next to caldera that will have the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride in it. I hear those docks are where they're going to keep the boats that will take people around DisneySea's sea (Transit Steamer Line), the floats for the water parade, and some other worker boats. The area is big, but I wonder if it'll be be enough for Radio Exercises. It's not far away from me. I decided to walk over and take a look at 3 o'clock break. But right then then it was almost 1 o'clock, so back to work I went.
What I do isn't very interesting, but I like it well enough. I've basically told you all there is to it, so I'll tell you about some other stuff that's been happening around here.
Lately some of my friends have been going nuts from pulling seven day weeks. At least it wasn't me this time. They've been getting ready to fill the sea in most of Area 3 (note : Yamata-san's "day" began before the process of filling much of Area 3's sea began on February 1st) and there's still a lot of work to do. The sea in Area 4 (Lost River Delta and Arabian Coast) is already filled up. There are big doors, like in the locks in a canal, that divide the sea into four sections.
The sea near where I'm working will be the last on-stage part to get filled. It runs from Point Vecchio Bridge to Arabian Coast. There's still some work to do on the shores and I hear there'll be some kind of water, fire, laser show thing put in the sea in this area. (It'll be sort of like the big brother of Fantasmic!) They've installed a bunch of pipes and stuff on the bottom of the dry sea in front of Mediterranean Harbor. There's also a big rectangular concrete hole in the sea about six times the size of my apartment that's centered with the three sections of shore in the area. I guess they'll put some sort of fancy fountain things in it..
Ok, things are really starting to move quickly around here. I heard more news from one of my supervisors at 3 o'clock break. Turns out that on March 2nd they want to start putting water into the area near me that I just mentioned. That means, if everything goes according to plan, all of the sea, except those backstage docks, will be in by March 2nd!! I bet you think those exclamation points are there because I'm excited. Well, I am, but it's really because of the realization that there will be no more shortcuts through the sea after that. I'm going to be walking a lot more. At least the exercise area is moving closer.
That reminds me, they said something funny at the Morning Assembly just before they filled up Area 4. I think I mentioned in my little smoking story that there are a lot of nasty chemicals that need to be used here (just like at any construction site). So we'll be careful, they told us that the sea at DisneySea will have over 42 million gallons of water in it (it's true) and whoever pollutes it will have to pay to have it drained and replaced! I don't think they'd actually make us pay, but I'm not going to find out.
It was break time again, so I headed over to take a look at that dock area. It's kind of small for Radio Exercises. There's no way were all going to be able to line up properly. It's going to be "different". I noticed that they're working on a bunch on the floats for the water parade in there. It was hard to see anything because they're all behind scaffolding and tarps, but I could see that the barges for the floats are named after Disney characters. I think it's kind of appropriate that DisneySea's parade will be on water, not land.
On the way way back from the docks I noticed the "tunnel" that the Transit Steamer Line will take when it comes out of Mysterious Island's caldera on it's way to it's dock at Mediterranean Harbor. It's part of my work area, but I realized that I hadn't walked through that tunnel in weeks, maybe months! My boss really doesn't mind if sometimes I take an extra five minutes for break, so I still had more than 15 minutes. If I walked fast I could probably make it all the way around the inside part of the site and be back in time. I really wanted to walk through the caldera one more time before they fill it up with water.
WOW!!! I forgot how big it is in there... It's HUGE! And it's basically done, too. There was a big difference compared to the last time I was there. It really looks amazing. I know it's based on Jules Verne stuff, but I felt like I stepped into a Hayao Miyazaki movie or something. Even the submarine looks like one of the big bugs from Naussica. With the caldera's walls surrounding me I felt like I wasn't anywhere near Tokyo anymore. It was really weird and incredibly cool.