The day before leaving for Latvia was a busy one. One of my favorite annual DC events, the European Union Embassy's Open House Day, took place, and the group I sing with entertained visitors with traditional Latvian folk music at the Embassy of Latvia for a couple of hours.
Afterwards, my friend S and I headed to the Embassy of Denmark for a special Eurovision Song Contest watching party. That was oodles of fun, and I hope to attend next year's event at the Embassy of Austria! There's nothing like some cheesy European pop music and good old fashioned European hospitality.
S is a huge Eurovision fan; she taken time off of work to watch the semi-finals online, and had a clear list of favorites. Seeing as the Latvian entry, Aarzemnieki with "Cake to Bake", had not made it into the finals, we rooted for the Netherlands, which is S's ancestral homeland - plus I really liked their song. We did also root for Austria, and a couple of other countries such as Montenegro.
The party was jointly sponsored by the Embassy and by Eurovision
Americas, Inc. I'd known nothing about the existence of such an
organization, but as they explain on their website, Eurovision Americas
is headquartered in Washington DC, and "provides a
constant stream of news video to the networks of Europe, the Middle East
and Africa." S and I loved the party, and were very excited by the
awesome Post-it note pads we received as gifts that evening.
It was a tiring but fun day, and a good way to kick off my European adventures.
Afterwards, my friend S and I headed to the Embassy of Denmark for a special Eurovision Song Contest watching party. That was oodles of fun, and I hope to attend next year's event at the Embassy of Austria! There's nothing like some cheesy European pop music and good old fashioned European hospitality.
S is a huge Eurovision fan; she taken time off of work to watch the semi-finals online, and had a clear list of favorites. Seeing as the Latvian entry, Aarzemnieki with "Cake to Bake", had not made it into the finals, we rooted for the Netherlands, which is S's ancestral homeland - plus I really liked their song. We did also root for Austria, and a couple of other countries such as Montenegro.
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| Fancy Post-Its! (Photo by S.) |
It was a tiring but fun day, and a good way to kick off my European adventures.
Off to youtube Cake to Bake...
ReplyDeleteDid you see the "Paldies latin'am" song late last year? Joren, the lead singer in Aarzemnieki, was involved in that. His is such a great Euro-story, as he is German, but has learned Latvian due to participating in an exchange program and just liking Latvia so much. Aarzemnieki received some slack for not being sleeker and more professional, yet at the same time lots of people liked them precisely due to the lack of sleekness (cannot think of a better way to say this) and the huge amount of enthusiasm they had.
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