Australian Open 2019
Happy Monday!
I hope you had a great weekend.
Tj and I spent Saturday at the Australian Open. Since we went last year, we've become tennis fans. We were looking forward to attending again this year, so I bought Tj tickets for his birthday.
We were thrilled when we arrived and found we had awesome seats. At first, I thought we were in the wrong section because I didn't realise I had bought seats that good lol. We were so close to the court!
The weather was nice that morning and it was only supposed to get to about 22 degrees. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, but it was breezy - perfect tennis watching weather. Or so we thought.
We had tickets to the day matches at Rod Laver Arena. The first match started at 11:00 am, but we got there around 11:30 and wandered around the grounds a bit. It was already packed and we were excited. It was going to be a fun day.
The first game we saw was Shuai Zhang from China versus Elina Svitolina from Ukraine. Svitolina won in the end, but by the end of the day, Tj and I both agreed that this was our favourite game, even though we hadn't heard of any of these players before. It was very close and that made it more exciting to watch. They both played so hard.
Now by this point, we were pretty hot. The roof was open at the arena and the sun was blaring down. I'd say it was at least 10 degrees hotter in the arena because we weren't getting any breeze. We kept going out to buy drinks and at one point I stepped out to buy a hat. In between matches we did another wander around and found some food for lunch.
Then we went back to our seats to watch Serena Williams from USA play Dayana Yastremska from Ukraine. It was another good one, but Serena is just so strong and she won pretty quickly. I was excited to watch her in real life. She was very impressive and so powerful.
Next was the game we were waiting for. By now it was about 4:00 pm and we'd been out in the sun all day. Every time we thought we were about to get some relief and the sun was going to duck behind the open roof, they'd open it just a little bit more and we'd be in full sunshine again.
I'd been reapplying sunscreen all day. We brought our own bottle, but when that ran out we'd reapply at the sunscreen stations set up around the venue. It didn't help. I actually got burned through my pants. Either that or my pants got so hot they burned my legs. I've never had that happen before.
The final game was Novak Djokovic from Serbia against Denis Shapovalov from Canada! We had brought this Canadian scarf thing my mom gave us to wave around, but at that point, Tj was just using it as a hanky.
Djokovic is currently ranked number one in the world, but Denis had a lot of fans in the crowd. Everyone cheered very loudly every time he scored a point.
But it was soooo hot. Too hot. In all the years I've known Tj, this is the first time I've ever seen him get too hot. We had to keep leaving to get out of the sun for a few minutes. It was even more annoying because as soon as we were out of the arena, it was cool. Outside there was a breeze and it was the perfect weather. Inside was making us feel sick. And to top it all off, the bar was out of ice.
Even the players were complaining at one point about the shadow on the court. It was brutal. We were going to watch outside on the grass, but it seemed like such a waste of our 'awesome' seats, so we'd always go back inside.
Djokovic won, and then we were out of there pretty quick.
We had an awesome day but by the time we got home, I just wanted to shut the blinds, sit in the dark with the air conditioning blasting. I was asleep by 8:30 pm haha. Too much sun for me.
Overall it was a great day. Tj and I are both a little sunburnt and were pretty dead last night but managed to be very productive around the house today. Now it's Sunday night and we are watching more tennis on TV and getting ready for the week ahead. I'm going to go read.
Lesson learned - next year we only buy seats in the shade LOL.
