Barcelona Swatch The Club Swatch Launch Event 2001

Day 2 (saturday):  The launch event.

After a good breakfast, we took the metro to "Eucagest - Complejo deportivo, L'Hospitalet Nord".  A sports complex with a small nice stadium, a sports hall and so on.  When we entered the sports hall, we saw the following:


A giant table soccer game and more...

Now, we understood why the theme of the event was "games".  During inscription, people we divided into six groups.  Over 200 people participated in total, that is about 150 more people joined for the one day launch event.  Many spanish collectors came for the first time to a swatch event.  All groups had to complete a course of several tasks such as playing in the
giant table soccer game (see above), acting as chess pieces, sack-race, water gun baloon race, pictionary (draw a swatch!), ...


 Tony and  Gabi seem to have more fun than the author of this webpage :-)


Ready to play.  (Markus did a great job!)

After the competition, we had a good lunch on the stand of the stadium.  Then it was time to announce the winners.  This was done in a typical swatchy way:  As the counting of points for the different games was not completely transparent (maybe even a bit chaotic :-), it was decided that everyone was a winner.  All participants would receive a special packaging (numbered to 271 pcs) of the club watch 2001 World2.  Among other things, the packaging of the club watch also contains a funny quiz game with 144 cards (swatch and non-swatch questions) and a special dice.

Ton Cleijne (head of swatch the club) had a surprise for us:  A giant "lifesize" version of the quiz game:


Preparing for the game

Six representatives of each group played the game.  The group of the winner of the game (Stephen from the UK, congrats!) received a special special packaging made of yellow transparent plastic (the normal one is green transparent plastic) and numbered to 30 only.  Here is a picture of the two different packagings, and here is a closeup photo of the numbers.  Overall, a funny afternoon with many different activities.

In the evening, we had a superb dinner at the restaurant Can Travi Nou a little outside of the city.


Collectors from the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Switzerland, and Germany preparing for dinner.

The mood of the group was great and the evening ended in singing, dancing, and a little drinking:


Ireland vs. Netherlands?


I don't think that I can write an intelligent comment here...


The team from Swatch The Club

I don't think that we have discovered a new Enrico Caruso during that evening but we all had a lot of fun.  At about midnight, we returned back to the city to a disco:  The famous Otto Zutz club.  A nice location which was still quite empty at about 1am.  We learned that the spanish people go out at about 10pm to 11pm for dinner and at about 2am for disco / dancing.  Nevertheless, everybody in the group wanted to dance but unfortunately, the DJ kept on playing terrible music.  So we took the last metro at about 2am back to the hotel.

The next morning, it was time to say goodbye (until june :-) again.

Another great event in a phantastic city.  Thanks to all at swatch the club for the smooth organization.

If you want to see some more "touristic" pictures of the beautiful city of Barcelona, click here.

22-APR-2001

Andreas Wiethoff

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