My trip to Eurovision 2008 in Belgrade, Serbia – Roy van der Merwe
2008 has been my only ever visit to a country inside the old Yugoslavia and I really had been looking forward to visit such a country. It was also the Eurovision with one of the biggest highlights and also some of the worst nightmares possible.
As normal Morten booked the hotel for us and it was one of the most interesting hotels – located very central but across a MacDonalds who had weeks before our arrival been burned down during their war. I however did not feel scared for one moment, I was especially impressed by the Serbian youth, they were really nice, friendly, helpful and eager to meet international visitors.
One of the two horrors about my trip revolved around foreign currency. Most people know South Africa has foreign currency control and you are allowed to get foreign currency only a month prior to your departure. I went to my bank and asked what currency I should take for Serbia. Obviously they did not have their money and I had to pick between UK ponds, US dollars or Euro. The bank said the safest would be TRAVELLER’S CHEQUES in AMERICAN DOLLARS. So that is what I picked. Imagine my shock when it turned out that SERBIA does not exchange AMERICAN EXPRESS traveller’s queues and I was stuck the entire Eurovision without money. Luckily Morten helped me – he loves shoes and I bought some expensive shoes for him on my credit card in exchange for money to use day to day.
The second horror involved our hotel. One afternoon it looked like rain so I told Morten I think I would go back to the hotel before the rain. I arrived in our room literally seconds before a water pipe burst in the bathroom and it started to flood our room. I spent 30 minutes trying to get all our luggage (and especially our precious promo singles) out of the room and into the passage. Once I had everything out of the room, I ran 4-5 floors down the stairs to call for help at reception. They finally managed to stop the water but by that time, our room was more than a meter in water. They took me and all the luggage to another room and once I got there, I just fell on the bed, totally exhausted. Meanwhile Morten came home, got his key to our room from reception and came up to our room. As he opened the door (by that time they had cleaned all the water) all he found was a totally empty room. He thought we had a robbery in our room. He ran down to reception and then was told about what happened and they took him to the new room where he found me sleeping on one bed with all the luggage on the floor.
But besides those two incidents, Eurovision was great, I loved especially Latvia’s entry and was really impressed with the way Serbia organized it and their disciplined volunteers.

I will go back any day to Belgrade for Eurovision despite everything.