Throughout the night of 31 December and during the morning of 1 January, people can go and listen to the 'longest new year's wish' in all languages, at the Antwerp Tower of Babel.
It is an initiative by Maud Vanhauwaert, who is Antwerp's city poet, as an ode to the multilingualism in the city, repo
The Tower is a three-storey bamboo construction that has been standing in the north of Antwerp since last summer, has to place the multilingualism of Antwerp in the spotlight, and is "an ode to speech confusion" in a city where more than 400 languages are spoken, reports VRT.
When it reaches 2020 somewhere in the world, visitors will hear the countdown and the corresponding wishes in a language from the relevant time zone. At 11:00 AM Central European Time, it was Samoa's turn to ring in the new year, followed by the Fiji Islands, repots the Gazet van Antwerpen.
This will continue until 1 January at 11:00 AM, when it will be Hawaii's turn, and the whole world will be in 2020.
Maïthé Chini
The Brussels Times
