Our time in Lisbon is starting to get a little blurry and most of the time we can’t remember which day it is. So here’s a recap of what went down during the last two days.
On Wednesday we started our day at the press center, where we saw the first dress rehearsal. Read all about it here. It was great, we were really impressed by lots of acts, especially Hungary and Denmark, who were flawless. But then we saw Italy’s rehearsal and freaked out completely. While Fabrizio did a stellar performance, Ermal was out of key several times and even lost a bit of the lyrics. We are now very concerned about Italy’s chance of winning this, but we hope they improve by today’s jury final. And of course that they manage to get through that without repeating the crotch gate from 2013.
Then we waited around the press center for an interview with Hungary, but they were too busy smoking and eating, so we had to wait until tomorrow. That’s rock’n roll for you. But at least we had a nice chat with head of press Simon, who said he really liked our interview we did in Stockholm with darling Freddy. Those head of press people are quickly becoming our favorite kind of people.
In the evening we went to the Wiwijam to watch the editors take selfies with artists onstage and talk about the workout session of their siblings. That’s fanboys to you. But we also saw some great performances, the highlight being Cesar begging us not to make him take his hard out, which is exactly what we were planning to do. Bummer. But he did a great cover of Purple Rain, and he truly is our new prince. Also, we really enjoyed Bulgaria‘s performance. They turned out to be the party animals of the evening hanging around chatting to everyone, they must be in about a million selfies by now. Benji Ingrosso also came to sing for us and do some damage control making certain that he loves us all. Awww, cute.
Yesterday we figured out that we should check out Eurofan Café so we started off our day patiently queuing up to get day passes. Obviously they don’t know who we are here in Lisbon as we have been spending an unacceptable amount of time waiting in line. Afterwards we rushed off to the press center to be interviewed ourselves by Norwegian media and meeting up with the wicked AWS from Hungary to have chat with them about Norwegian metal, church burning and eagles, you can read all about it here.
Luckily we managed to get tickets last minute for the semi-final and we found a stellar spot in the standing area right next to Norway’s sofa in the greenroom. We had a great time dancing along to Norway, Moldova, San Marino and Denmark; head banging to Hungary and sending live updates to our biggest commercial TV channel TV2 when the toilet break songs were on.
We became a little nervous when the odds plummeted after Rybak’s performance, but he sailed through to the Grand Final as expected. Afterwards in the press conference we posed as proper journalists on behalf of the local newspaper Namdalsavisa and asked the one question Norwegian media got to ask Alex. We bet NRK were real proud of us. Actually NRK asked the Norwegian media to coordinate their questions for the national press conference afterwards, but we couldn’t be bothered and it was too complicated for us, so we asked a question in the international press conference instead. While Guri was asking the question on how the Eastern European bloodbath would affect Norway’s chances at hogging votes, Philip Kirkorov, nodded eagerly and our own head of press looked a little scared. Watch the clip from the press conference and our 15 seconds of fame here:
But enough of the serious stuff, now it was time to party. We started off at Eurofan Café only to find out we were probably not in their target group, so we moved over to Euroclub. There we networked with one of the organizers behind Israel Calling and told him how much we would love to come to Tel Aviv next year and bonded with fellow Norwegian fans discussing whether we should host next year’s Eurovision in Bergen with Åse Kleveland hosting again, Sissel Kyrkjebø doing a da capo in her white bunad and having Euroclub on top of Mount Fløien. At 3 am we had to go home since Guri had to get up at 7 am this morning to appear live on the morning news on Tv2. Life as celebrities sure is tough!