It’s time to pick up where I left off yesterday, heading to the arena for the “preview” show of Semi Final 2. I guess it’s basically a full dress rehearsal, but all the voting stuff at the end is just made up for fun (well, for rehearsal). On the way over we saw a few of those superlambananas.

Joining the queue to enter the arena, there was plenty of security around as always, but this time we also noticed four policemen standing against a nearby wall, all carrying sizeable machine guns.

Once inside this time we headed right for the back of arena, mainly to have something to lean against, but also to see how things looked from here, knowing we’re going the the “real” version of semi final 2 the next night. As luck would have it the first place we picked to stand was also right in front of the ‘green room’ for Australia – although since they were going to be the last act, we knew they wouldn’t be there long if at all.

We found a few aussies, and a few more, and before long we had our own little small but enthusiastic crowd of friends. One thing that was super sweet, one of the women there had (like us I guess) wanted to come for Eurovision for years and years, and this was her first ever show. Once we all met up, said hi, and she settled in and got comfortable. She saw the massive “Eurovision 2023” displayed up on the stage, realised that it finally was very ver real, and promptly had a little (happy) cry about her dream come true. It was quite lovely.

Eventually the show itself got underway, and I won’t go through every act but again there were some standouts.

Romania: Undortunately stood out for the wrong reasons, I guess they must have had a very limited budget as they basically made no use of the stage at all, just a not very exciting video backdrop which did nothing to enhance the song.

Belgium: Great song, elevated by a very strong performance and amazing visuals and stage presence – a real crowd-pleaser.

Albanian: So much more powerful than expected, they did great.

And of course Australia – awesome, because Australia! Not just that, it was great to hear the entire crowd, no matter what country, singing along. Everyone we’ve met so far has said the Australian entry is fantastic. Will this translate into votes when the real semi final is on thought? We can only hope. They did a massive cheer at the end so fingers crossed.

The interval acts did a great job, I’ll probably talk about them more after the ‘real’ second semi final performance.

Then it was on to the fake voting, as this is just a rehearsal show. To make sure the camera crows also had a proper rehearsal, they put some unsuspecting staff members into each of the ‘green room’ areas for the participating companies – who then made a point of completely over-acting whenever the camera was on them, giving their best ‘anxious face’ or their best ‘Hello Europe!’ – it ended up making a potentially pointless part of the show so much fun. And we all cheered them along with their fake reactions to their fake winning 🙂

Another area where this different from the real show, was the perfomances from UK, Spain and Ukraine. As last year’s winning country, Ukraine doesn’t need to compete in a semi-final, nor do the ‘Big 5’ of UK, Germany, Spain, France, Italy. While they had a crowd it made sense to record some of these countries’ performances so they have something to broadcast later (and put on YouTube!). So, it was cool to see Spain, UK, and Ukraine perform as well.

Before we know it that was the end of the show. But it wasn’t the end of the night. What do the young people do after Eurovision? Why they go out clubbing of course. What do the old people do after Eurovision? Well this time, to the surprise of many, yep we went out to the ‘EuroClub’, at ‘Camp and Furnace’ in Liverpool, not too far from the arena. The EuroClub is playing host to many Eurovision competitors past and present, and tonight they were hosting Conchita (formerly Conchita Wurst), who won with their sing ‘Rise like a Phoenix’ for Austria back in 2014. She opened her set at the club with a truly amazing acoustic version of the song, just her and her guitarist, it was quite magical and had the previously noisy crowd quite spellbound. I’m so glad we went. She did a few more songs but nothing could top that opening number. We also saw the Azerbaijan boys from ‘TuranTuranX’ as they squeezed past us in the club.

Straight after that though it was very much time to shuffle back home and collapse, well and truly worn out after a huuuge evening. And to think we get to do it all again tomorrow!