It’s Semi-Final 1 day!

Had a nice slow start to the day, since we know it’s going be a late one.

It was time to tackle the growing pile of laundry, one of those inconvenient things about travel but it must be done. The nearest laundrette was a few km away, without great public transport access we Uber’d ourselves over to Prima Cleaners to it all done. The whole place was app-driven but not even an app could fix the multiple broken machines so we had to wait a bit before we could begin. Eventually got two loads washed and dried, and as a bonus had a great chat with another Australian who is over here for Eurovision as well. Hey Trish! 🙂

That was pretty much the whole morning – watching clothes go around and around.

My hopes for a curry wurst (let’s just call it a delayed longing from frankfurt) we’re dashed when the German food truck didn’t have any – yeah it kinda did end up being the wurst food truck! But I made do with a tasty smoked Frankfurt so I guess it’s only second wurst?

The German food truck was way further away from the laundrette than I thought I was going to be, so slowly shuffled back to hotel for a rest before the next thing on the agenda – meeting up with all the felllow Aussie Eurovision fans at a venue before heading off to the semi final. Not just a venue, ‘The Venue’ – what a helpful name, imagine trying to find that in Google! :). It was a very nice place though.

It was great to meet more of the Aussie contingent and hear stories of Eurovisions past, and rampant speculation about who would and wouldn’t get through tonight’s semifinal. And after a few hours of chatting, it was time for us all to find out.

The venue was only about 2km away but we got an Uber due to the whole walking-is-not-my-friend situation. As always with Uber ‘2 minutes away’ suddenly becomes 15 mins as soon as you press Confirm, but no to worry, our car did turn up.

I’ll preface this next bit with a happy note to say that nobody was injured. Yeah. So maybe 200 metres into our journey, at an intersection, our Uber and another car both tried to pass through it at the same time…. Our car was soundly hit on the front passenger wheel, by another car travelling across the intersection we were travelling down. I wasn’t paying attention to the lights to see what had been going on, the important bit is that nobody was hurt, though discussions got a bit heated between the drivers before everyone took a breath and calmed down. Weirdly, there was nothing we could really do except get out of the car and continue on our way. If they need our version of events Uber has our details. So yeah, just to add a little drama to the day. If anyone had “car accident” on your Holiday Bingo card, congrats! 🙂

So, plan B, we walked down to the venue, grabbed a Fish Finger Butty on the way. There have been all sorts of issues with the ticketing system leading up to the event, but happily ours were working and we were through into the arena with no fuss. On our way we saw Eurovision-famous Mans Zelmerlow, and right next to us in the queue to get in was Survivor-famous George from Cabramatta! So we had a quick chat and didn’t do the “OMG can we get a selfie!!” because we’re far too cool and dignified, or at least pretending to be.

Happily the line moved relatively quickly and we made it into the arena. And wow, it really looked amazing. We found a spot to stand, not too far from the front of the space, just a few rows back, which was nice. Sometimes, enough tall people would get out the way so I’d get a glimpse of what was going on 🙂

We also saw the three remaining member of Bucks Fizz were in the audience (well, in the luxury ‘green room’ section), so it was nice of them to come along, as they won Eurovision for the UK back in 1981 with ‘Making your mind up’.

The opening to the show was kinda emotional – making us all take a moment to remember just why the show cannot be hosted in Ukraine this year. It was heartening to hear the floor manager tell us before the show that any of the camera operators and crew, plus roles in the creative direction of the show and so forth, were being done by Ukrainian people tonight.

Without going through every single performance, there were a few standouts.

Croatia: For just being complete bat-shit crazy. It doesn’t get much more Eurovision than that.

Finland: Slightly less bonkers, and a ridiculously catchy song that the whole crowd went wild for. Kinda hope they end up winning the whole thing. Cha cha cha!! Amusingly, one of the Australian crew looks so much lead the singer (with a brilliantly matching costume) that he interviewed on the BBC as the actual Finland contestant, Käärijä 🙂 https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/bbc-interview-appears-to-confuse-eurovision-fan-with-finnish-entrant-kaarija/ar-AA1aYceP

Sweden: Loreen is almost everyone’s favourite to take out this years comp so of course she had an enormous reaction from the crowd.

Portugal: A much bigger response from the crowd that I was expecting – maybe there were more Portuguese people in the crowd tonight than I would have thought.

Also worthy of a mention is the performance of the stage itself. Last year in Turin, there was a heap of drama and many acts having to do some last minute changes, due to the fact that the video wall couldn’t reset itself quickly enough between acts, so everyone had to make do with just lights and not a video background.

Here, the whole back of the stage was a moving segmented video wall – part of the ceiling could lower itself to meet the floor, and lights could drop down or ride up from just about anywhere, making for an incredibly dynamic presentation area, which many countries enjoyed making use of.

I guess the hardest part to describe is the atmosphere. If you’ve been to a big sporting match, it’s basically the exact same vibe, just with more teams playing the game at once. Everyone has their favourite, the whole room is buzzing with energy, the happiness was contagious particularly any time Finland and their Cha Cha Cha song was mentioned anywhere at all. There was certainly a lot of love in the room. A little more cool air would have been welcomed – though happily we weren’t all completely jammed in like a mosh pit, there was still room to move.

Two very different interval acts follow, a beautiful and haunting rendition of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World”, and later Rita Ora, performing a joyful medley or her hits, with what felt like 1000 backup dancers. Ok maybe 20, but it was still an impressive display the way they all worked together seamlessly.

The hosts for the evening did a great job, without quite as much of the usual Eurovision Host Cheesiness ones comes to except – but they still have a chance for that with two more shows to come.

After the voting was done, the deliberately slow process of reading out the successful countries began, and it was fun to see this whole ‘goes like clockwork’ event interrupted by a crowd who would not stop changing “Cha Cha Cha!!”, or calling out Norway in the hope they would be announced as a qualifier (Spoiler alert: they were).

I could probably go on, but it’s midnight, so time to bring this to a close. It was brilliant, and an absolute thrill to be a part of. The start of a long-held wish finally coming true, and you’ve got to be happy with that.