Lithuania

 Another "nice but uninteresting" drone postcard. There's a very lovely national flag display on the stage arches when the postcard ends, that with the Lithuanian colours looks like a rainbow. 🌈

Monika has clearly watched Barbara Pravi and tries to serenade the camera in a similar way. Unfortunately this comes off to me more like Jurijus Veklenko - camera showing the singer from all possible angles and moving directions where the singer itself doesn't move around.

There's also a mirroring screen effect so we see two of her at a few points.

The floor has zebra lines moving around, that later turn into a blue cloud. The sun is a disco ball, apparently this is one of the countries that counted on it to rotate but I'm not sure it would have been enough because the whole thing is quite uniteresting - despite Monika being very sweet and just fine vocally.

Latvia

 Yay, stream! And yay, postcard! It's some city at night with a drone. Quite sleek as a postcard, unfortunately not like 1991.

Citi Zeni are being themselves. Every colour imaginable is either worn by them or is on the LED. The most effective part is when it all goes black and white and we see the sax player in front of a very bright sun - it looks great but by that point I've already lost my patience with the song.

I think there's a lot of pre-recorded vocals here. At least the chorus sounds very studio-y. The boy in green is obviously live, including a "Europe make us proud" or something like that adlib. And there's a "You're welcome Europe" in the end... ok then.

Bonus: Backdrop has giant cherry 🍒 and avocado 🥑 emojis!

Albania

 Literally a sekret, it seems. 10 minutes in and all that's on the screen is a giant "-6". Hard to tell if it's a timer gone wrong, a temperature or a very unusual staging concept.

At least this we're allowed to share, I think:

Join us for Latvia in a few minutes, sems that they've fixed the issue so we should see that one.

Hopping over to Turin

So, it begins. At least for the non-influencer press.

Apparently, while most of us were busy panicking about the stage malfunction, much of Turin has been concerned about a more threatenting situation, as reported by Torino News 24. A rogue deer has caused havoc in the city.

Pericolo!

See you in the morning for Albania, for which I'll hopefully wake up, and Ronela will have hopefully come up with a child-safe routine.

ESC Nation is back!

We're back!

After our highly successful Rotterdam blog, ESC Nation returns to report to you during this year's rehearsals in Turin. Unfortunately, we weren't able to send boots on the ground. But fear not, for we have seven magnificent bloggers with access to the rehearsal stream that are ready to give you their unsugarcoated take on everything you need to know.

The second rehearsals start tomorrow at 10:00 CET.