Wednesday, May 27, 2009

May

France in May is a wonderful festival of long weekends, less work and better weather. This year the month has been nothing less. No less than four of the five weekends included in the month this year have been long weekends of some kind, whether it has been the Friday, the Monday or the Thursday, offering that elusive chance to take a "pont" or a "bridge" and take four days off for the price of one.

This year I tried to go one better and took the Wednesday as well as the Thurs and Fri; I suppose my bridge was closer to the Manhattan bridge rather than the Pont Neuf. I didn't go anywhere in particular for the whole time, but I did spend a really fun afternoon at Roland Garros, a few days before the beginning of the official competition.

In blazing sunlight my friend M and I took seats at three different tennis matches to watch various upcoming stars battle it out for a chance to compete in the world-famous French Open. The competition proper hadn't begun yet, these players were just trying to get into the first round. Despite the scope of my tennis knowledge being limited to very basic scoring and virtually no knowledge of current players, I have to say that the standard was amazing.

This weekend G and I are off to Istanbul for a spot of mosque-visiting, Bosphorus-sailing and no doubt dodgy kebab-eating. More news soon...