Image: EBU / ANDRES PUTTING

Today, the Turquoise Carpet event was held in Rotterdam as part of today’s opening ceremony!

escgo! has previously attended various red carpet events (or different-coloured versions) in Oslo 2010, Malmö 2013, Vienna 2015 and Lisbon 2018. This year, we followed the event on its live stream, and use photos provided by eurovision.tv.

And now here’s our review – these were our highlights in today’s glamorous opening event!

The event started with a delay of 17 minutes, and began with an interview with the mayor of Rotterdam. Since a delegation member from each of Iceland and Poland tested positive for COVID-19, these countries were excluded from the event. The delegations of Romania and Malta, which stay in the same hotel as the aforementioned delegations, were precautionally excluded as well. Poland’s Rafał and Australia’s Montaigne greeted the viewers via a video.

The delegations appeared roughly in the order of their appearance in the shows, with the automatic finalists being mixed among the first third.

And so, the first delegation to be interviewed was Lithuania!

EBU / ANDRES PUTTING

Can you do the finger dance? Let us know in the comments below!

Russia’s Manizha already won…

EBU / ANDRES PUTTING

…our ChatVote 2021. And once again, Manizha won our hearts a bit more!

Italy wore purple…

EBU / ANDRES PUTTING

…and we learned that band member Victoria (to the left) is half-Danish, and it was indeed her who picked the band name “Måneskin”.

Croatia came in appropriate outfits:

EBU / ANDRES PUTTING

If I ever go skiing again, I’ll give her a call before.

San Marino’s Senhit shone brighter than the sun:

EBU / STIJN SMULDERS

Meanwhile, we’ve had enough of hosts and journalists asking questions about Flo Rida. We think the actual star of the Sammarinese entry is already there all the time – it’s Senhit. And nobody else.

Also, the delegation of San Marino appeared with flags showing the Eurovision hearts of those delegations that were missing at the event – Australia, Iceland, Poland, Romania and Malta. A nice touch!

Meanwhile, in Georgia…

EBU / ANDRES PUTTING

Will Tornike replace the projected lyrics accordingly?

Moldova came in style of course…

EBU / ANDRES PUTTING

…but probably didn’t bring any sugar.

Gjon’s Tears from Switzerland wore a snow white something:

EBU / ANDRES PUTTING

His fashion choices keep entertaining us.

…and then there was Latvia:

EBU / STIJN SMULDERS

The queen of the night was once again the green of the night.

And these were our highlights from this “red” carpet event, which we only got a very “curated” insight into. The dominant part of the live-streamed event was made up from interviews with the delegations. We would have preferred more impressions from the general atmosphere, and thought the focus on interviews was unnecessarily large.

We hope to be back at similar events in the future, to bring the atmosphere closer to you. In the meantime, you might enjoy a throwback to the Blue Carpet of Lisbon 2018 and check out our own photos from that event here, here and here.

You can also rewatch the Rotterdam 2021 turquoise carpet event here: