An ordinary day out to watch the tennis somehow become more eventful than I was expecting…
We managed to get tickets to the Open Sud de France, not quite the French Open, granted, but it was still pretty fun – plus when it’s only 12 euros for a day tickets to watch professionals play, you can’t really say no to that. Naturally, we decided to go in armed with enough food to last us the entire day: with sandwiches, crisps, several boxes of cookies, some random bits of fruit, we were good to go. Imagine our horror when we get to the door only to be informed that food was interdit in the arena, therefore we’d have to chuck it all. You weren’t even allowed to take in the lid for your water bottle, “just in case you threw it at the players”. Great start to the day.
Undeterred, we set out on a plan of action. First step: eat as much as you can. So we sat ourselves down in the car park, at 11.30am, and attempted to work our way through what can only be described as our FEAST. After cramming in as many sandwiches and crisps as we could, we were still faced with 4 boxes of cookies, packets of sweets and a lone banana.
Second step: find all means possible to sneak the rest in. And boy, we did ourselves proud. Coat pockets, hidden zips in bags and even space up jumpers were filled with cookies. A plan which was potentially brilliant if it worked, and extremely embarrassing if we were to be caught: “oh sorry, I didn’t realise those cookies were in my bra” wouldn’t really wash. Third step: walk back to the door, waddling, carrying a huge bin bag of empty cookie boxes and repeatedly say “on a trop mangé, on a trop mangé” to make them think we’d eaten the whole lot. Worked like a charm. I even sneaked in a bottle lid, just for good measure.
As for the tennis, despite the fact that during the course of the day we only saw one player that any of us had ever heard of, it was fun to watch, especially when you suddenly decide to start rooting for a particular player (in this case, it was simply because he was Canadian) and genuinely start wanting them to win. We managed to see 4 matches, 3 singles and 1 doubles. Not bad going!
Highlight of the day was undoubtedly managing to get entry to the VIP area – at first, we hadn’t realised what it was, and had casually wandered over with our arena tickets, thinking that we could go straight on through. Yeah, it turns out you have to be slightly more important than that. We saw a competition stand, where if you filled in a crossword, you had the chance to win free VIP tickets and get to go into “The Village”, this wonderland of the rich and famous (or so we thought). Through a mixture of luck and turning on the pure English/Irish/foreigner charm, the women running the competition decided that they liked us enough to both give us the answers and then declare us the winners. Brandishing our blue VIP wristbands, we ran (very civilised) over to the Village and sat around drinking free champagne and some very nice wine, trying to pretend that we were rich and important, but all the while looking, very obviously, that we didn’t belong there.
I decided this would be the perfect “mingling” opportunity, but when it became apparent that no one really wanted to talk to us, we just carried on drinking the wine and watched all the pretty people walk around. “Famous” people check: the Montpellier football team (apparently a big deal), Miss Languedoc Roussillon and some other model-like people (pretty, but they don’t do anything other than look good) and one of the tennis players that we then saw on court later that evening. It’s probably the only time I’ll ever get to go into a VIP area – such a great time!
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