Eurovision

Categories: random

Date: 17 May 2009 18:55:38

Yesterday we (HD, kingsfold and I) headed on over to derf and strathclydezero's place in Edinburgh to celebrate the annual cheese-fest that is Eurovision. I would like to point out that I didn't drink any of this (apart from a very small sip of Rioja) as I was driving, but I did contribute the two eastern European (ahem) delicacies in the picture, the bottle of fruit brandy (known as tuica in Romanian and palinka in Hungarian - you might be able to see that the label is in Hungarian, but I actually bought this the first time I ever went to Romania, in 1993, and as I was in a Transylvanian border town there were as many Hungarians as Romanians around, hence the Hungarian booze) and the Romanian vodka in a carton (which if you look closely has a sell-by date of September 1994!!!!). We didn't crack open the vodka in the end, but someone mentioned vodka jelly which I think is a great idea, I'll have to try and find a recipe. Either that or do something with fruit - a few years back a colleague gave me a small bottle of home-made cranberry vodka for Christmas, which blew my head off but was quite delicious. Eurovision was really fun. I never thought I'd say this, but I thought Graham Norton commentating was a breath of fresh air, I think he got just the right tone (and I did appreciate his veiled but barbed comments about the action of the police earlier in the day at the Moscow Gay Pride march). It was a bit of a shame that some of the cheesiest acts were knocked out in the semi-finals, but there was enough to keep us going. How embarrassing is it to admit that having watched the semis and the finals and so having heard the songs several times, a day later I can still remember several of them and have been having them going round my head all day (in particular, Norway, Romania and Turkey, with a splash of Germany occasionally).