It’s been my first proper day here, having got my first actual impressions of the host city earlier on. Once my little city trip was over, I paid a short visit to Altice Arena, where I got an idea about Romania, Serbia, San Marino, Denmark, Portugal and unfortunately only a hint of the United Kingdom

My highlight of the day was clearly San Marino, which I watched in full in the hall. Oh, San Marino. First, one of the robots holds a sign “This is just a rehearsal”. Later in the song, he holds a sign “Justice for Valentina!”. And it doesn’t stop there: The performance was actually good. Vocally strong, in tune, and most importantly: Adorable and very approachable because the complete package isn’t perfect. We’re not watching a Swedish entry here, with human robots; we’re watching robots and humans. Guilty pleasure? Not only that, it’s actually also a quite good song, I think. Sure, the rapping part is questionable, but in general, San Marino adds so much lightweight, honest fun and colour into this dark and heavy 2018 contest. So much so that I even begin to believe it will qualify, and maybe even do very well in the final. You heard it here first, San Marino will win.

And the robot was also a star in the press conference:

San Marobot

What else can be said about those few rehearsals that I got to see? Denmark was a bit out of tune here and there, but will surely find a lot of fans who will vote for it. I won’t, though I have a relatively neutral attitude about this one. Portugal was hard to judge as the volume in the fan tent was too low. However, Barbara Dex would be proud of the main singer. I only saw SuRie from the United Kingdom before the song began, so I can’t say anything about her performance, but her white dress and the pink/blue neon bulb rectangles behind her looked very promising.

And with that, it’s off to finally do some partying!