I left Paris on Monday morning and flew straight to Düsseldorf, Germany which only takes 50 minutes. I arrived in the tiny town and went to the hotel to meet my friends Julia, Jessie and Steph (it's so small it only takes 7 minutes by train to go from the airport to town centre). We unpacked a bit and then went to meet Steph's parents, who are visiting from Australia, for a Eurovision cocktail!
I had a delicious 'Belgium' cocktail, with pineapple juice, rum and kiwi liqueur! We then wandered around Düsseldorf, doesn't take long, and found a traditional German restaurant for dinner. Don't even ask me how to spell/pronounce the name! I had lots of meat and potatoes, and demolished the entire plate, although I felt pretty sick afterwards given that normally I live on vegetable stir fry.
After dinner we wandered around for a bit longer, but there really isn't a hell of a lot to do in Düsseldorf, so after meeting our other friend Tanya, we all headed back for a relatively early night in preparation for the big day!
On Tuesday morning we slept in, enjoyed the complimentary breakfast and then went shopping! Even though I must have been to Zara and H&M a thousand times, there's always something new to find...
One excellent pair of shoes later and we stopped for lunch at a Lebanese restaurant, and then tried some delicious strawberry cheesecake gelato. It's quite a cute place, but I would certainly not recommend spending large amounts of time there.
In the afternoon we had to catch the U-Bahn to the stadium to go pick up the remaining tickets. The U-Bahn is a weird metro that turns itself into a tram when it emerges from underground. Very strange. We also bought some flags to help re-pre-sent!
We then caught the U-Bahn back to the hotel to get ready! With everyone decked out we hit the cocktail bars for a few strawberry daiquiris, then back to the stadium for the show! And what a hell of a show it was!!
The stadium was enormous and obviously didn't sell out so we got 'upgraded' to ridiculously good seats. We were watching the first semi-final, where 19 of the smaller European countries were competing for 10 spots in the grand final. The 'Big Five' qualify automatically on the basis that they fund Eurovision (i.e. France, Italy, Spain, the UK and Germany, not lions, elephants etc.).
There were some thoroughly crazy acts, but in the end my favourites (Armenia and Norway) didn't get through. I still don't understand why. Here is the Armenian entrant...
A truly crazy night!
We got home fairly late and managed to get a couple of hours sleep before heading back to the airport and home to Paris. Oh Europe.
I had a delicious 'Belgium' cocktail, with pineapple juice, rum and kiwi liqueur! We then wandered around Düsseldorf, doesn't take long, and found a traditional German restaurant for dinner. Don't even ask me how to spell/pronounce the name! I had lots of meat and potatoes, and demolished the entire plate, although I felt pretty sick afterwards given that normally I live on vegetable stir fry.
After dinner we wandered around for a bit longer, but there really isn't a hell of a lot to do in Düsseldorf, so after meeting our other friend Tanya, we all headed back for a relatively early night in preparation for the big day!
On Tuesday morning we slept in, enjoyed the complimentary breakfast and then went shopping! Even though I must have been to Zara and H&M a thousand times, there's always something new to find...
One excellent pair of shoes later and we stopped for lunch at a Lebanese restaurant, and then tried some delicious strawberry cheesecake gelato. It's quite a cute place, but I would certainly not recommend spending large amounts of time there.
In the afternoon we had to catch the U-Bahn to the stadium to go pick up the remaining tickets. The U-Bahn is a weird metro that turns itself into a tram when it emerges from underground. Very strange. We also bought some flags to help re-pre-sent!
We then caught the U-Bahn back to the hotel to get ready! With everyone decked out we hit the cocktail bars for a few strawberry daiquiris, then back to the stadium for the show! And what a hell of a show it was!!
The stadium was enormous and obviously didn't sell out so we got 'upgraded' to ridiculously good seats. We were watching the first semi-final, where 19 of the smaller European countries were competing for 10 spots in the grand final. The 'Big Five' qualify automatically on the basis that they fund Eurovision (i.e. France, Italy, Spain, the UK and Germany, not lions, elephants etc.).
There were some thoroughly crazy acts, but in the end my favourites (Armenia and Norway) didn't get through. I still don't understand why. Here is the Armenian entrant...
A truly crazy night!
We got home fairly late and managed to get a couple of hours sleep before heading back to the airport and home to Paris. Oh Europe.
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