When i was in elementary school, i had to walk about 1 km to and from school, and the same at lunch. When i was in grade 4, they started building a new school a tiny bit closer to home, and as curious kids, we would go check out the work!
Men at work
At first, we saw the big hole with the mould for the foundation. Then, we saw the metal structures being added, the big cranes working, etc. I would stand there, with my friends, just watching all that.
What is that?
One day, i decided to talk to the workers there and asked them questions about what this was for, or that. The man was really nice and offered us to tour the school under construction.
That is big
The school was to have only two levels but at the time, i seem to remember that only the bottom one was accessible for a visit (the second floor probably didn’t have a floor yet). It looked huge without any inside wall. We could see outside from anywhere.
The unofficial tour
I vaguely remember that he pointed to different areas saying this was going to be a class, this was the bathroom (i remember seeing all the pipes there), this will be the gym, and so on.
Is that allowed?
I am not sure if this guy was allowed to bring in non workers on the site, especially kids (without protective gears) but it felt like quite a privilege for us.
Interesting that 2 years later, i would actually go to that school, at least for part of the year, before we moved. You can read about my time in this very special school, in here.
How about you? Did you ever visit something that is not common? Did you ever see the behind-the-scene of something, somewhere? Share your story too.
1 thought on “Remember when…? – Construction”
We have a much beloved local Shakespearean group in our downtown park, and one year the theater was burned to the ground. It was a shock to the community and there was a successful fundraising effort to rebuild the theater. When the new theater was constructed, they conducted tours behind the scenes which compared the new construction to the old building. A huge amount of what goes on in any theater is behind the scenes. There is a costume/props room, of course, and changing rooms for the actors, but there were also massive rigging systems that could be raised and lowered and rotated to change the look of the actual stage. We couldn’t go up to where the lighting and sound system was, but we could see up through from a side an audience would never see. What surprised me, a little, was that the new theater was so crowded (they had a limited amount of property to build on) and they were already having to make difficult decisions of clearing out some of the old props and costumes to make room for new things (this was a difficult thing because they tried to reuse as much as they could from old productions and incorporate them into the new productions). It gave me a new appreciation of all the work that goes into what amounts to two to three hours of entertainment for the audience.