Tennis anyone?

Back again after a bit of no blogging. Life got busy here, comme d'habitude ("like usual", in French).
 
Happy Memorial Day everyone! In rememberance of all who served and died for our freedom!
So...
Last Friday some colleagues of Mr. K, from his graduate study years, popped over to Paris for a weekend. They are currently working in Heidelburg and Geneva, so it was rather easy. We had a great time meeting and catching up, like you do.

One of the activities we had planned was to go to the French Open Qualification round to watch some tennis at the Roland Garros Tennis stadium.

The matches for that day:

 

But, being France, the weather predictions were terrible. The most optimistic report said rain on and off all day with a high of 12C (that's 53 F for those not accustomed to Celsius). The most pessimistic report said we'd have storms on and off all day with possible hail and a high of 9C (48F). Fun!

So of course we went.

This time, however, the weather people were pretty accurate.

Yay rain!

But we decided we'd try to make the best of it. I mean, it's not like it could rain all day, right?

And clay courts get better in rain too!

Well, maybe the storm clouds would pass...

No? *sigh*

We didn't stay much longer. We were wet, cold and couldn't sit down anywhere to shelter from the weather.
I mean, when this is the most tennis you see:

You understand.

However, that didn't stop me from getting a picture at the Suzanne Courts in the momentary pause between storms!

We all decided to go back to the Latin Quarter, have lunch and then see Notre Dame, Shakespeare and Co., followed by a delightful snack of cupcakes from Bertie's Cupcakery (best little place for cupcakes and a coffee- you should try the salted caramel and the strawberry lemonade cupcakes, delicious!)

This was the first time I had been back inside the Notre Dame since I was an au pair, 7 years ago.

Lots of crowds, but oh so pretty.

Rose window

All in all, we had a great time on Friday.
So we didn't see any tennis matches, save for a minute when we first got there before the rain came in.
(But we got to see tennis balls the size of basket balls for sale.)
We couldn't sit down anywhere.
(But we were able to get a nice steaming cup of mint tea in a collectible cup while we chatted in a group.)
And we ended up leaving early from the Open.
(But we had the delight of seeing the Eiffel Tower, the Notre Dame and sharing memories together.)

Good times!