Hello again! Apologies for the delay in this post, we didn’t have much time in Baku on the last few days to write an article as things were manic with blogging the first dress rehearsal of the final as well as various other things – Baku certainly came alive on the last few days!

You’ve probably already read the dress rehearsal article that took up most of our early evening in Baku on the Friday – but if not, you can recap here. During the day, we met with the ESC Nation team for lunch at a place called Red Sofa along with a bunch of other Eurofriends. It seems we spent the majority of time eating at either the aforementioned Red Sofa or at a place nearby called Cafe City – both of these were on the rather lovely Fountain Square – so called because there were numerous fountains around the pedestrianised area! In fact it proved very difficult to arrange to meet people as we often said “We will meet you at the fountain at 2pm” to find we were standing at the wrong fountain! In the end we learned and made the children’s carousel our meeting point – at least there was only one of them.

So the dress rehearsal, as you’ve probably heard, had a lot of technical problems, first we missed the United Kingdom’s song completely as both sound and audio had disappeared from the stream in the press centre. Then during the following few songs, we got the picture back but then they decided to play around with the picture and have this blocking effect which kept changing from one to another and was highly distracting! We had audio now and then, and we could make out the gist of most songs. Remarkably (or not) everything was finally sorted out for the Azeri entry and thankfully everything went well for the remainder of the rehearsal. We decided to leave after the interval act the voting process is long enough without it being fake, and went for more food before going to the Official OGAE Party held in the suburbs – funnily enough at the Miracle Apartments where we were staying with Roger from the ESC Nation team.

There were a lot of unhappy fans out in Baku regarding the official EuroClub. Firstly, you had to be accredited and an OGAE card was not sufficient, and secondly, for those of us who did manage to get in, we realised that they didn’t play as much Eurovision music as we’d have liked – sometimes we got the latest pop/chart stuff from the likes of Rihanna and other times we got random jazz music that completely killed the mood. Now we’re not averse to dancing to things other than Eurovision, but Eurovision is one of the very few times of the year where we get the chance to dance to Eurovision music with like-minded people. So there was some sort of mini “revolt” and an alternative party was arranged for anyone who was accredited or had OGAE membership and it was advertised as “Eurovision All Night” – we got back at 10.30pm and the party was already going. It was being held open air in a basketball court right beside the apartments, which was really handy for us. It was slightly quiet at first but it soon filled up with lots of Eurofans and soon it was in full swing! It was slightly surreal to be dancing in the open air to “Bye Bye Baby” at 1.30am but everyone seemed to be really enjoying themselves and dancing along to loads of Eurovison and National Final classics from now and yesteryear. We even had a little party in our apartment as people kept coming up to refresh their drinks – at one point all of the Baku-based bloggers from esc-chat.com and ESC Nation were in our living room along with some other chatters and MBers and various other Eurofriends! We bailed out before the party finished, but we were told the next morning that it went on till 5am – god help those non Eurovision fans that were staying at those apartments! And the bar staff must have thought we were all slightly peculiar too!

Next morning (or by then it was afternoon!) we all had ever-so-slightly sore heads and had a relaxing day preparing ourselves for the big show ahead! We went out for dinner, (this time to the Cafe City, surprise, surprise!) before heading out to the arena. When we went to pick up our tickets, we had been told that we needed to take our passports along to the show for security reasons and right enough, it was checked about 5 times before we were allowed into the arena! We went to the Press Centre beforehand, and the place was buzzing, everyone running around excited for the three and a bit hours ahead of them. We chatted with some other people and the thoughts were it would either be Russia or Sweden. Finally we got into our seats ready for the show to begin!

And what a show it was. We had slightly better seats for the final than the semis, in the same block but further up, and we were right next to a bunch of empty seats that we soon realised were where the presenters were sitting during the songs, and we could see them being preened by the hair and make-up artists. They even applauded at the end of the songs!

The audience were loudest for Azerbaijan, obviously, then Russia and Turkey, but that was not surprising. It was so hard to predict who was going to win. During the interval act, we nipped out for a bit of fresh air as it was rather stifling in the arena and the heavens had opened! We were worried we were going to be drenched on the long walk to the entrance of the arena, which was a good 15 minutes away. We managed to get back in in time for the voting, and we were very happy with the way it went. After 3 or 4 votes, it became clear that Sweden were going to run away with it! There were loads of cheers every time Sweden got 12 points and when Loreen came on to do the winning reprise, loads of people were up singing and dancing!

Apart from the many 12s that Loreen got, the highlight of the voting is when Sarah Dawn Finer read out the Swedish votes as Lynda Woodruff. Loads of us Eurofans were laughing and cheering, but many other people were wondering what the hell was going on! Kudos to Sarah and SVT for giving us that little present!

After the show was over, we popped into the Press Centre to see Loreen’s press conference. Thankfully, it had stopped raining, and we had the chance to chat to some Eurofriends – the general consensus was that the right song had won! Loreen’s press conference was disappointingly, a bit boring, but this was mainly due to some of the inane questions some of the journalists asked. Even Loreen seemed a bit weirded out by it all. It’s been a bit of a running thing with the press conferences, and we wish people would put a little bit more thought into the questions they were going to ask.

When that was over, there was a mad scramble at the pigeon holes as there was still a lot of unclaimed press packs and CDs. We have never seen anything like it, lots of Eurofans fighting over CDs and some people walking away with 4 or 5 copies of the same CD. We’re not that fussed with things like that, but there were a few CDs we would have liked but were unable to get, and it seems unfair that some people think it’s fair to take the lion’s share of things and leave others empty handed. In fact, we were giving away the CDs of songs we weren’t big fans of to other people, who really appreciated it! No doubt a lot of the promotional material is now all over eBay!

We left the Press Centre at 5.30am as dawn was beginning to break and popped into EuroClub, where thankfully, there were still people there and there was some free beer too! This is the time of year that we dislike the most as we had to say many sad goodbyes to Eurofriends, some of whom we have known for years, and others with whom we had forged new friendships in Baku. At 9am, when the sun was shining, the party ended and we said our final goodbyes to the stragglers and headed home in a taxi, both elated and dejected at the same time!

We were not flying out of Baku until Monday, as were a few others, so after a much needed lie-in we went out for a nice lunch with the remaining few then spent a relaxing afternoon, where we found out Loreen had made number 1 on iTunes in the UK, which was a pretty impressive feat!

We then headed out for dinner, for once to a different place than the usual, then off to a club where we had one of the most interesting nights we spent in Baku! Let’s just say it involved a transsexual bar owner, smelly toilets and a random ethnic dancer that took centre stage half way through the night, with people throwing 1 Manat notes all over her! They must have played “Euphoria” about 6 or 7 times, and each time it got a massive cheer from the crowd that consisted of the last few remaining Eurofans and some Azeri locals! By 5am, the whole thing had caught up on us and we headed home for one last night in our apartment.

The next day, we checked out, and headed straight to the airport for our flight. The airport in Baku is a strange affair that involves you scanning all your luggage before you have even checked in! We had heard reports of massive queues, but thankfully it was pretty quiet, probably due to it being the Monday and we checked in painlessly. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find anything decent to eat at the airport so we had to go hungry, and when we finally got on our flight, we slept most of the way. Thankfully we were only going a short distance to Dubai, so the 2.5 hour flight was not too bad.

And that was it, Eurovision 2012 was all over! And what a wonderful 11 days it was. There were lots of highs, there were a a few lows, and there were even a few WTF moments too! Thanks for reading all about our adventures in the capital city of Azerbaijan, we hope you enjoyed it! Look out for an overview article on Eurovision 2012 from us soon!