So apparently my attempt at posting “regularly” failed. But I am going to make up for it with a bunch of new posts all right in a row! Chronology won’t really matter, so don’t worry about the order in which you read them. But I’ll start with what happened today because it’s still fresh in my mind:
For a special student price of 50 RMB, I went with some of my friends to the Shanghai Rolex Masters tennis tournament. I may not be an avid tennis fan, but the price alone was incentive enough for me to go check it out since tickets for other people began at 460 RMB and went up to 1600 RMB. But anyway, today was day two of the event and our plan was to get there in time to see Roddick play at 2:00. We got there in time but figured he’d be playing for a while and that we might as well just walk around and see who else is playing on the smaller courts. The first court we checked out just so happened to have Nadal practicing against some random tennis player. IT WAS AWESOME!!! I was close enough to touch him. Proof:
After gawking for a good 30 minutes at Nadal, we left to go see who else we might be able to find. We found Isner playing which was pretty neat. He’s really young and very tall, as well as good-looking. He wasn’t playing very well when we were watching but I believe he ended up winning. Then we finally started to make our way to the Center Court, where Roddick was playing... But as we were walking we heard all these Chinese people yelling and making noise and rushing around, so we stopped to see what the deal was. What was going on? Oh nothing really- just Nadal leaving his practice court. Because of our positioning, I was able to snag this sweet pic before he was mobbed by Chinese people. I got skillz, I know:
Finally we got to the Center Court to see Roddick, and luckily we got there when we did and got to see him play some, because the guy he was playing gave up after the second game of the second set. I was a little disappointed we couldn’t see him play more, but I was glad I got to see him whoop up on that guy! Here is the Center Court while Roddick and the German guy were playing. It was huge!!
After this match ended, we went to go find Querrey. We were the only Americans watching that match, so we definitely got a good number of glances from Querrey. We cheered for him and tried to give him lots of moral support before we left. He was probably my favorite to watch. Next we headed back over to the Center Court to check out who was playing. It was Ljubicic versus Zhang Ze, a Chinese no-name. I was the only one in our group cheering for Zhang, but I thought he did really well considering who he was playing. He won the first set, lost the second set, and was pretty dang close to winning the third set. There were a lot of people watching this match (since it was a Chinese guy playing) so it was interesting to see how loud and enthusiastic they all were throughout the entire thing. I really wish he had won but it was a really fun game to win, so it’s okay!
The last match we went to was Ferrer against Llodra. We didn’t stay for very long because it was getting late and everyone was hungry. There was food at the place we were at, but it didn’t look very appetizing and was more expensive than the 6 kuai noodle soup I got. :) Not to mention we had about an hour long commute ahead of us. (We always get on Line 1 from our school, and to get to the tennis stadium we had to go to the VERY end of Line 1… 17 stops, then transfer to a different line for 3 more stops, THEN take a taxi to the stadium.)
So that was how I spent my day today, and it was a great experience. I have never really watched tennis before, but I might start now... I had so much fun and really enjoyed watching all the matches. Plus it was obviously cool to get to see so many famous athletes!
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