Le tennis: Roland Garros!

Anybody been following the French Open? Of course you have, it's the last major before the quintessentially British Wimbledon begins later this month.

Of course, rather conveniently, the French Open happens to be held in Paris. And seeing as I live here...

I love being on my @thirdyearabroad casually just bought tickets for the French Open :) #rolandgarros #excited
— Victoria Goodsell (@9victoriag) March 13, 2014

HOW exciting?

In the light of the exams we've been ploughing through, me and Parisa have been really looking forward to this for a while. We only had a ticket for court one and the other annexed courts, because a) the tickets were quite pricey, and b) they had 'sold out', so we were quite irritated to see on the big screens that there were loads of empty seats in the bigger courts. Still, never mind.

On Sunday morning, we got there quite early expecting it to take ages for us to get through the gate, but it was actually super easy. The gate opened at 10, and we were inside by 10:06, which made things nice and easy. We wandered around exploring for a bit, and had a go in the free photo booth...

We literally only had two seconds to make each face, and I think I panicked a bit, leading to the really stupid expression in the bottom right picture *blush*, but it was a laugh. 

Anyway, by the time we'd finished, it was nearly time for some tennis. We basically situated ourselves in Court One for most of the day, where there were a lot of doubles matches going on - women's, men's and mixed.

The first match was an absolute walkover, two sets played and won (6-0, 6-2) in an hour flat, but then I've also since realised that the winners are seeded first in the women's doubles, so perhaps that's less surprising than it seemed at the time.

After this, Parisa was starting to get a bit hungry, so we went exploring for food. I bought a gaufre for €5, which I didn't think was too bad considering, but I attempted (and later failed) to resist getting a packet of crisps to keep me going. €2.50 for a packet of some thin, fried bits of potatoes is enough to make anybody wince.

Parisa wanted to finish her hot dog, so we hung around outside to see the outcome of Andy Murray's mammoth 5 set match, which had carried on over from the day before. We got our picture taken, and I got accosted by a woman with a TV camera, and when asked about who I thought was likely to win in the match between Djokovic and Tsonga, made some completely inane remark along the lines of, "Djokovic, because he's Djokovic, he always wins!" and sounded like a complete chump in the process.

Which is pretty embarassing, but I was kind of put on the spot. 

And in all fairness, I was right. *smug face*

Back to the tennis, though. What we'd really been waiting for were the matches featuring french players. A few people we know were there earlier in the week (in the pouring rain, sadly for them. We were really lucky and had perfect weather all day), and they said that the best atmosphere was when the french players came on, for what I think are really obvious reasons.

The first match was les français contre les français, but it only lasted ten minutes before one side had to retire. The second match was two french against a mixed nationality team, but they lost 6-3, 6-4. 

So that was that! It was a really good day, and although I felt a tiny bit guilty for not revising, you only do your year abroad once and I wasn't going to miss out on this! :)

I have three more exams to go, but two of them are this week and there's a long gap after that before the next one, which, fingers crossed, should allow me to revise and do some other stuff at the same time. I've still got a lot of stuff to do before I leave - but just 26 days to do it in!

As they say, profitez-en!

Vicky xx