Yesterday saw the first 2 dress rehearsals of semi final one, and esc-chat.com were in the Press Centre blogging live for you! If you missed that, you can still catch the article here. Overall, despite a few technical hitches the rehearsal went well, and the stage looks really impressive. The hosts were fine too, if a bit rough round the edges, but I’m sure that will be fine with practice. We left the arena after the rehearsal as there were a few parties going on. We stopped in at the Croatian party first, which by that time had run out of all the free drink apart from grappa, so we had a quick one of those. We said hi to Sandra from Slovenia again, and met Nina Badric outside where we had a quick little chat with her and told her we loved her Croatian Dora entry from 1995 that only got one point! We also bumped into Eva Boto again who was was with her sister!

After this, we decided to head off to the German party that was just a few yards down the same street. On entry, we were told that the beer was free, so we got stuck in and chatted to lots of our friends who had arrived. We saw Gaitana entering and got a little wave from her, before we headed to the front of the stage, just in time for the performances to begin. Roman Lob was first on stage and treated us to a mini concert of 5 songs, which included his Eurovision song.

He really performed well and got the crowd singing along. He also seemed humbled by the audience reaction and told us he really appreciated the support he was getting.

After a short break, we saw Nina Zilli at the side of the stage looking rather fabulous in a silver top, and then she came on stage to sing L’amore e Femmina.

She also performed another track from her latest album which was really great, think we’re going to have to download it from iTunes when we get back home.

We saw loads of Dutch journalists coming ton the front of the stage, so we guessed that Joan Franka was next, and we were right, as we soon saw Joan sans headdress at the side of the stage with her trusty guitar! She came on stage to rapturous applause and told us she was so happy to be there. We then were treated to some really good cover versions of “All That She Wants”, “If I Can’t Have You” and “What’s Up?” before we got “You & Me” which had everyone singing along.

We were hoping from a performance from Gaitana but we were told she had left so we stayed and consumed a few more gratis beers before we jumped in a taxi and headed off to a sadly rather deserted EuroClub where we spent most of the time out on the terrace chatting to some new arrivals – pretty much everyone seems to be here by now! Another great night here in Baku. Finally it’s show night, and we will be in the arena to see the spectacular show! See you tomorrow!