Wednesday: day 1 of the tour

Today went by so quickly.

We started out with some welcome speeches.  Interesting, but not super profound.  They handed out their business cards, which are little mini-figures with their information printed on the shirts.  (Note: not all employees get such business cards, just the special ones.)

Then we went to the employee museum.  We had a tour of the history of how Lego started and got to see select sets.  There wasn't really enough time to do this properly, but we did get a pretty good idea of everything.

Then we went into the vault, where they have one copy of every set that has been made (with a few exceptions).  It was rather tight.

People were going a bit crazy over sets from their childhood.  However, I don't remember having any real sets per se, just a bucket or two of creative and a bunch that we had found at a garage sale.  I found them.

Ben was very excited to find the monorail.

We also found set #1.

Then we had a traditional Danish lunch.  Dark bread with fixings on top.  We later learned that there are five varieties and only five.  They do not experiment or change things up.

After a short session on molds, especially the ones that they recently found in the ground, it was time to go to the developer's building.  No pictures were allowed in there.  We had a presentation on the Saturn V rocket, the Boost Droids, Steamboat Mickey, and creation of new pieces.  At the beginning of several of the sub-presentations we were asked how many people had at least two copies of it...because if they had just asked how many people had it everyone would have raised their hands.

We decided to go to the Lego House store after that.  We picked up the unique-to-Billund sets but are waiting until tomorrow to get anything else.

After a short break we had dinner with the designers.  The designer at our table has been working on the hidden figures sets.  He was nice, but a bit of a downer.  He enjoys his job here, but doesn't like putting Legos together any more.  The town is safe and education is good, but there's not much to do.  Hidden Figures stuff is good, but the app development is missing some components that just got left out due to time.  Anyway, he was interesting to talk to but also did not make me want to come work for Lego.

These were the guys from the first two designer presentations.  They're quite hilarious.

Then we got to the last event of the night: design something.  I tried designed a gem mine, Ben tried designing a spinner.  Neither of us were very happy with the results, but we only had two hours.  All the pieces were divided up into bins that took up most of the room.