Uh, Uhhhhhhhhhh. Uh, uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

One observation about the French I have made is that outside of the occasional soccer riot and maybe Tony Parker, they really don’t care too much for "les sports." You don’t see a game on in many places and you don’t hear much talk about sports day to day in the office. Just not a big thing overall. That said, they do have two world class / famous events that take place each year, one of which we saw last year which was the Tour de France, and the other we got to experience recently which is the French Open.

Having seen on Sportscenter for years the famous red clay of Roland Garros, it seemed like a very Paris thing to do and oh by the way, also a good reason to take an afternoon off work during the week. Cleaver had the opportunity to get tickets through work for the Quarterfinal round so, porquoi pas?

Roland Garros is located on the the outer edge of Paris proper, easily reached by a Metro line from our house. There are two main stadiums and a handful of other smaller tennis courts in what I can best describe as a park among a neighborhood. The way the tickets work, they are bought way in advance so you don’t know what matches you will see, you just have tickets to one of the courts on a given day and you see who ever is playing that day at that court.

Serena on the right about to Serve

Lucky for us the first match for our tickets was Serena Williams who eventually won the tournament against Svetlana Kuznetsova who had won the tournament herself a few years back. The second match was two Spanish guys not named Rafael Nadal, so I was not familiar with them.

The Williams' match went all 3 sets, was really back and forth and quite exciting before Serena finally pulled away and won the third set. After that ended we walked around the grounds a bit before returning to our seats for the men’s match. We didn’t stay for the entire men’s match as we had been there several hours by this time and it was getting later in the day. It was also a very rare "sunny" day so a bit of the sun kiss started to set in, so having thoroughly enjoyed our afternoon of tennis we called it a day and made our way back home. Box checked on the second famous French sporting event we have now been able to attend.