Switzerland put on a bizarre opening ceremony to mark the completion of the world’s longest tunnel.
The new £8.5bn Gotthard Base Tunnel was launched on June 1st with a strange yet spectacular opening ceremony that featured 600 people including a winged woman/ baby with an oversized head, dance troupe in their underwear and a man with a birds nest on his head
Angela Merkel, Matteo Renzi and François Hollande joined the Swiss President Johann Schneider-Ammann for the opening ceremony and a first class ride through the tunnel.
RT reports:
Switzerland celebrated the opening of the world’s longest train tunnel, a 17-year project that cuts through the Alps and cost €11 billion to construct – but all anyone’s talking about is its ridiculous opening ceremony.
Efforts to highlight the incredible engineering accomplishment of the 2,300 meter-long tunnel resulted in an utterly strange opening ceremony that reportedly cost €8 million.
Co-ordinated by German director Volker Hesse, the performances were supposed to represent various aspects of Swiss culture, but, at times, ended up resembling a Kanye West fashion show.
More than 600 actors reportedly took part in the show, which at one point, included a topless creepy-looking bird that hung over nine performers, representing the nine miners that lost their lives during the tunnel’s construction.
Soon after the elaborate performance began, viewers took to Twitter to ask the question on viewers’ lips: what is actually going on here?
The strangest opening ceremony for a piece of basic transport infrastructure ever: https://t.co/INcMs3HTXj
— Dane Jasper (@dane) June 1, 2016
@hufflepuffle84 Apology accepted. I feel embarrassed for the Swiss … hardly artistic or celebratory, it was depressing and in poor taste.
— Margaret Weston (@margweston) June 3, 2016
Niamh Harris