10:35 (Felix)

We’re in Euroclub and began blogging about the rehearsals in our rehearsals blog!

This is the area were we can sit down at tables, and where the Meet & Greet will be held later:

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And upstairs, people settled down in a theatre (yes), to view the rehearsals:

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Coffee is available, but only in glasses:

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That much for now, we’ll be collecting a lot more things to talk about throughout this day, and watch out for our rehearsal blogging and interviews (coming soon!)

11:31 (Felix)

The initial stress has gone and we settled down in Euroclub, trying to find a routine (knowing that once you find a routine, Eurovision is over). The area with the tables is quite relaxed, the most journalists are sitting in front of the screen, watching the rehearsals. More people will arrive soon, and the Meet & Greet will begin (MF-Style) in about an hour. Let the stress continue, it’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

Now I’m enjoying my own coffee in a glass, might go to the theatre to watch Croatia soon.

12:38 (Felix)

It became quite busy now in the Euroclub press centre, as it’s time for lunch, and the speed interviews happening very soon. In the meantime, we can show you a bit how it all looks like:

Walking through the entrance of Euroclub, to the press facilities

13:52 (Martin)
Time for me to add a few impressions of the first day of action now that my rehearsal blogging shift is over! Sitting in our lovely theatre now (see above) and enjoying Denmark while Danny blogs and Felix edits our interview with Natalia from Austria. So far things have been pretty decent – you expect a few initial problems on the first day of proceedings (and calling them “problems” is overstated really – some members of the “fan press” get terribly dramatic when the bar runs out of the right kind of sandwiches for a few minutes…), but things are rolling nicely here and it’s great to be part of the madness. Plus the bar has beer, for heaven’s sake!

A few more run-throughs of Denmark – this time with pyro, apparently! – then we’ll be mustering the troops to go and interview Hannah from Slovenia. Hope the poor girl knows what awaits her.

15:55 Danny

My turn to give some thoughts on the first day – one thing I can say is that it’s very well organised, every rehearsal and meet and greet seems to be running on time. I guess that’s Swedish organisation for you! We’re watching the rehearsals in the “viewing room” which is basically a small cinema, not exactly ideal but we can deal with it.

Downstairs is the main room where the meet and greets happen – these are basically very similar to the “speed dating” format at Melodifestivalen – you queue up to get 2-3 minutes with each artist. Some people seem dislike this format as it’s difficult to get a decent interview, but on the other hand it means more people get a chance to speak to the artists. As far as we know, once the press centre opens on Friday, the artists will be doing proper interviews, so stay tuned to see who we manage to grab for a chat!

So far today, we’ve managed to speak to Natalia, Birgit and Hannah, and they were all rather lovely!

Rehearsals have now finished for today, all that is left are more meet and greets, and then the first day is done! Both EuroClub and EuroCafe open this evening, and we’re hoping to pop along to see what they have in store – I’m sure we will become rather familiar with them by the time we head home in a few weeks!
This post might get more updates throughout the day, stay tuned!