The whole tunnel was secured heavily,
every 20-30 meters or so, a friendly guard was on duty. As you
will see below, this was absolutely necessary, as a lot of really rare
watches were on display and a crowd of close to 140 crazy Swatch
collectors was around...
Michael discovering the veggie set
A lot of journalists (TV and photo) were around during the whole day. Sometimes, they also filmed us collectors. Here, an interview with Annette and Holger took place about their passion of collecting watches:
This was my highlight of the
exhibition: The Helmut Newton special Fingernails (GZ183) from
2004. It is one of the rarest swatches, it was made in a limited
edition of only 100 pcs. You can read the interesting story about
this watch in the archive section
of my webpage. One of these watches was auctioned in 2004 for
more than $10000 US! This was the first time that I have seen
this watch in real life.
Johanna on duty! The Men in Black never smiled!
When we left the "time tunnel" exhibition,
we suddenly ended in the sun, directly on the floating stage on the
lake constance.
As you can see, the spectacular eye
background of the stage (used for "Tosca") had been replaced by
something much better :-) A gigantic gent Swatch Once Again (GB743). Is
this the largest Swatch ever made? Probably not. I guess
that the giant Yellow Racer Swatch in
Frankfurt in 1984 was larger.
Klaus-Peter Mager (head of Swatch PR) giving interviews during the
whole day
I am really frightened!
Paolo and Tracey relaxing in the sun
It can't get better than this!
some designs of the stage from the past years, the Swatch design tops
it all :-)
In the afternoon, we had to leave the
Festspielhaus. On our way back home to the hotels, we stopped in
Dornbirn at the Swatch store. The store celebrated the 10th
anniversary, so Swatch had prepared a special packaging (limited to 250 pcs, unnumbered) for this
event. The Jelly In Jelly Sultans Joy (SUJK116) was sold
to gold & pioneer members.
The watch (SUJK116C)
comes packaged in a nice metal tin with the inscription "08/09/2008
Gold & Pioneer Members Meet The Swatch Store Dornbirn". The
watch has an extra loop
with the logo of the G&P event on the strap. As a bonus,
every tin comes with a nice key chain in the same design.
As you can see on
the pictures below, the usual rush of collectors occurred when the
special went on sale (OK, they also had some Austrian specials such as
the Vienna Come Together special 2007 and Vienna Come Together
special 2008). Some locals
asked me if something for free
was given away at the store :-) Of course not. In the end,
they had enough specials to make every collector happy.
Click here to read page 4 (evening cruise with lots of action and James Bond Gala Dinner) of my report from the G&P Event 2008.
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