Wimbledon

This entry is pretty belated, principally because I took very few of my own pictures, and have been waiting for others to upload theirs to facebook. I may have to modify that policy if I want to keep this thing prompt and current. Anyhow, I went on a day trip to the tennis tournament at Wimbledon last Friday (6/29). It was a wonderful exercise in impulsive and barely planned travel in a foreign country. Here's a hint: don't guess at which tube stop you want when you can ask a local. I'm proud to say that the whole thing went off without a hitch, and we got to see some quality tennis.

Hold on, not so fast. First I need to take you through the queue. Waiting in a queue is the British equivalent of waiting in line except for a few important distinctions. FREE STICKERS! Lots of stickers; I am the proud owner of eight. There were also queue concessions and queue attendants, all there to help me enjoy my two hour wait. Now, here's a brief lesson in free sticker economics. I had plenty of time to ponder this. When you print an absurd number of stickers and give your queue attendants quotas for handing them out, the market becomes flooded and the emotional value of the sticker plummets. In an ideal free sticker economy, recipients will guard their stickers jealously and wear them with glowing pride. However, in this sordid situation, these poor stickers had clearly become worth less than the paper they were printed on. Massive inflation had led people to treat this currency of joy as a sort of crude wallpapering material. It was more than one portable guardrail that fell prey to the sticky suffocating creep of queue stickers. It was horrible.

Oh right, Wimbledon. It's a pretty impressive tennis complex that seems to hold grass courts exclusively. There's a raft of simple, mid-to-low attendance courts surrounding the giant stadium housing "centre court." We never paid our way into the main event, but we did get to see Martina Hingis suffer a decisive loss. Somehow I was struck by the prominence of the female tennis players' patella tendons, and now I'm wondering whether my ability to focus on something like that is a tally against my masculinity. The opportunity cost of my gaze in this instance was staggering. It's true though, those things were huge.

Then we ate cups of strawberries and cream, for which Wimbledon is understandably famous, and enjoyed some decent pizza. Great strawberries.