Time has been running fast lately and it is hard to believe that I will be in Moscow in a bit less than two weeks. There is so much to do before leaving that I can imagine suffering from stress before getting on the plane. A postpone for a couple of weeks would be fine with me.
My accreditation has been approved, the invitation I need for VISA been received and sent off together with my passport. In a few days I should get it back and thereby officially be able to go – unless my passport gets lost somewhere in the postal service, but no – I don’t want to think about that.
Hotel and flight tickets are booked. As I will be flying from Copenhagen in the morning and lives in the other part of the country I will be driving to our capital the day before, spend a night there and be fresh for the plane to Moscow. I will arrive to Moscow in the afternoon on the 2nd of May and can hopefully have a nice relaxing evening meeting up with a few of those Eurovision-friends I see every year, but otherwise don’t see privately as we live in each our countries.
The next day it will all start. Getting in line for our accreditation badges, quickly checking out the press centre paying attention to where can I work from, where is the press conference hall, where can I get something to eat and where are the toilets and in my case also whether or not there are any indoor smoking facilities or if I have to go outside. Once all that is checked we will all look at the day’s program and decide upon which rehearsals we will be attending and which press conferences we want to be at. Though there is little walking distance this year between rehearsal and press conference it is not possible to be two places at the same time and some priorities will be made. Many of us will look ahead and try to plan every day as much as possible in order not to waste too much time and to work with some kind of structured plan for the two weeks, but if we have been going before then we also know that such a plan won’t be very old before the first changes are made. No matter how organised we plan to be it rarely works that way.
Before I even get that far there are still plenty of things to do first. I need to make sure to get clothes to much. Get some off to the dry cleaner, get it back and try to pack enough clothes for two week. Enough yes, but not so much that I will be bringing half of it back unused. Somehow I always end up packing way too much, but I hear that it is a natural part of being a woman!
I also need to make sure that camera, video camera and computer is in a workable condition and to bring enough memory cards and batteries. My spare mobile phone mustn’t be forgotten either as I might want to use it with a Russian SIM card. It uses the same charger as my regular daily mobile so at least I only need to bring one charger.
Bur before I can think too much about packing for Moscow I have a website here to concentrate on. Last year we changed layout of the site just a few days before the final. I was working on that together with all the other work in Belgrade. This year is different, but not much as we have a new design planned to be online just before I’ll be leaving. I really could do with a couple of more weeks – could we please postpone the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest?
