Once I learned the French Open (or as the woman at the opera told me "we call it Roland Garros") was occuring during my trip, I started scoping out how to get a ticket. While the tickets sell out very quickly, there is a legitimate resale sight that made buying a ticket really easy and relatively affordable (at least for the second day of play)!

If the opera was awesome, the Open was AWESOME.

There are three premier courts are Garros, one court seats ~15K, one ~12K and one 3K. I optd for the 3K stadium, thinking there can't be a bad seat in a stadium that small. YOu could also buy a general grounds pass, but I wanted to get into one of the premier courts, which came with a grounds pass for every non-premier court except for two. I think the two excluded courts are where the big names practice; access to these courts was limited to those with a grounds-only pass.

The weather was crappy....rainy and cold. We sat through two different rain delays. (I'll write later about the French and their apparent aversion to rain.) In the end, we stayed for about 8 hours and watched parts of 4 matches. Two matches were in the premier court, two others on the small courts. While the premier court was a great facility, if I had it all to do again, I'd just buy the general grounds pass. those courts were so intimate; they would have 3-5 rows of seats on one of two sides of the court; that's it. I didn't know who the players were (but the same can be said of the premier court; all the big names were on court #1 and #2), but it didn't matter. The first match we watched was a women's match on a small court, and a German was playing an Italian. I'm 99% sure the German's parents were right behind us, so that was fun. They were fairly quiet, but they made sounds of agony at times that only a family member would make. The second match was a males game on the premier court and pitted a Japanese player with a Slovakian. Match #3 was back on a small court, with a Spaniard player and someone from a country abbreviated BIH. (Trivia question: who is BIH? We spent a lot of time thinking about it and could not come up with it. Answer later.) The coach of BIH was right in front of us, and we were surrounded by the rest of his posse. They were vocal, which inspired the Spaniards' fans to get vocal. Very fun. However, the real funny part came from my traveling companion, Kristen. A year ago, Kristen started dating a guy who was her classmate, and thus one of my students. For most of the past year they have been literally on opposite sides of the world, but that has not stopped love from blooming. And blooming. And blooming. Most conversations we had over the weekend found a way to go back to the boyfriend, which was fine. Now, when the Spaniard walked on the court, Kristen made a comment about the muscles in his legs. Then, I noticed she started taking more pictures than she had been, and they all included the Spaniard (who was very good looking.) They she started commenting on how handsome he was. I noticed that the boyfriend's name did not come up once during the two long sets we watched the Spaniard.

Back to the tennis....the fourth and final match we watched was back on the premier court with a mens match pitting a Frenchman and an Argentinian. We entered the match in the 5th set, the score was something like 3-2, and it was 6:15pm. Before we entered the stadium and knew the score, we decided we would stay until 7pm or the end of the match, whichever came first. After seeing the score and the time, I thought we may change the plan and stay to see the start of the next match, which included an American female. No chance of that happening....neither the Frenchman nor the Argentinean could break serve. Ever. We finally gave up at 8pm and left, when the score was 16-15 France. We watched one more game on the screen outside the stadium to see it go 16-16 and left. In the end, the Argentinian won 18-16.

Concession stand offerings included: ham and cheese on a baguette, hot dog (really 2 hot dogs) on a bagette, salads.