Tennis

 I planned one thing to do today, but I did two things; being stranded in the desert hadn't been on my list this morning.

I hopped on a train to see the Madrid Open. I’ve never seen professional tennis in person before and it really was pretty cool. 

Madrid is a 3-hour train ride from here, and when I looked on a map to see how to get from the Madrid train station to the “Magic Box”* where the tennis tournaments are held, it seemed a bit convoluted and I couldn’t quite figure it out so I thought I’d just go and wing it. I forgot that 20,000 other people were also going to be going to the same place, so I ended up just following the crowds and it worked out fine.

This area, which has very little to do with actual tennis, is where people wait to see the players get dropped off to walk into the locker room, much like the stage door entrance at a Bruce Springsteen concert. 

And if you know who this is, could you tell me? Everyone went crazy when he showed up. 

Long story short, I think I enjoyed the practice courts more than the main stadium. I could see different players in more intimate settings and they looked like people I might know, in t-shirts and baseball caps banging the ball around. It's like if you just went to a neighborhood court to hit a few balls with a friend if your friend was one of the best tennis players in the world. Like Raphael Nadal, below.

Two minor observations about Rafa's pratice:

1. He was there with his coach. Every once in a while the coach would step in and say something. Every time he did that, I wondered what advice anyone could possibly give to one of the greatest players in the world. But I guess that's why he's the coach.

2. At one point during the practice Nadal gestured to his hitting partner to hit topspin balls to a specific spot on the court. For the next few minutes, whatever Nadal did, his partner hit perfect topspin balls to that exact spot. It's too late for me to ever get remotely close to that.

But I also watched a couple of matches in the main stadium, and that was pretty great too. 

All in all, a good day. Until I hopped on the train to get back to Barcelona. About 2 ½ hours into a 4 hour ride, the train stopped and the conductor announced that there was a fire on the track and we’d be stopped for about an hour. Which turned into two hours. We were in the middle of nowhere, in a place that looks exactly like the outdoor scenes in Breaking Bad. Nothing but dry dirt and scrub as far as you could see. They let us out of the train in groups of 20 or 30 to get some fresh air once in a while, kind of like prisoners who get to go out in the yard for a few hours each day so that they don’t become disruptive. And neither did we.

*That’s actually what it’s called in Spanish “Caja Majica.”