Irony

Gassing up for the journey. Good thing we did as we spent a lot
more time driving than anticipated.

In the end, we spent about 4 hours just eating a meal. Not that the meal took 4 hours, it only took about 20 minutes, but the whole venture to get the meal took about 4 hours. How is this possible you may ask? Well, for the second straight day, we got hopelessly lost in the city of Rouen. You would think after getting lost several times we might invest in a GPS. Well, here's the irony for you. We got lost trying to find a place that sells things that make it so you don't get lost, i.e. a GPS. Hopefully we'll have better luck tomorrow. But, we did get to see some cool parts of the city and we met a French guy who was disgusted that Frankie was from the same state that George W. Bush hails from. Or at least I think he was disgusted, he didn't speak a lick of English, but insisted on having a 10 minute conversation with us where he repeated, "Barack Obama! Black! Black! George Bush! No! No! Clint Eastwood! Texas!"

Cool looking statue in the middle of a round-a-bout.

I liked this house.

Tomorrow we play our next tournament in the city of Étretat. Étretat is a relatively touristy city on the Normandie coast that from all accounts is very beautiful. Gustavo told us that a lot of famous impressionists painters used to spend time up there painting the cliffs. We're both quite excited to see that, and hopefully excited to take a plunge into the ocean. I play at 9:30 and Frank at 11:00. Although Étretat is only about an hour away, we're taking our own car to this tournament so we have to be out of the flat by around 7:30, because I anticipate getting lost. If we win, we both would have matches again in the afternoon, and then depending on how we do, we will either play another round of this tournament on Sunday morning, or one of us will play in the semi-finals of a different tournament. It's confusing, but as I've mentioned before the system is fantastic and allows you to play a lot of tennis.

My 'La Tomatina' ticket!

Before our venture into town we got about two hours of tennis in this morning, but without a doubt the most exciting thing to take place today was the purchase of our La Tomatina tickets. La Tomatina is a famous tomato festival that takes place in the little town of Buñol in Southeastern Spain. Every year on the last Wednesday of August, 20,000 people gather in the town center and trucks dump 40 metric tons of tomatoes on the streets. After someone manages to climb a greased pole and retrieves a ham from the top, the festival begins, and people spend hours winging tomatoes at one another. This year it takes place on August 28th, about a month from now, and I can't wait.

All the trash bags have tails on them. We have no idea why. 

Wish us luck in the tournament. I'll let you know how it goes.

-Max