the rain in spain falls mainly in wimbledon

so hil (oh, hilary is one of my coworkers who's doing part of this trip with me) and i decided that since we're in london during wimbledon (and one of us was actually stayin at a friend's place in the city OF wimbledon), we decided to head on over to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, AELTC, for an afternoon of culture... it started with a tourist fan favorite of fish and chips at a local pub called fox & dog (after attempting to eat at a place called "jo schmo" and then headed on off to the AELTC. first of all, the place is annoyingly large to walk around to find the "non-ticket holders entrance". but after navigatin our way through the town streets we found the Queue... as is every day in enlgand, this day was very overcast with intermittent rain - so they gave us little stickers that said "i queued in the rain". HA! those brits think of everything. anyway, we made our way through the queue while it was overcast and a little drizzly, but once we decided to actually purchase our tickets Mother Nature had other things in mind. it was raining elephants & castles for the next 30 minutes. after waiting through this torrent, we made our way to court 3 (the highest numbered court our tickets allowed us to view) and sat down. over the course of the next 90 minutes, we saw the grounds crew assemble and disassemble the court 4 times (without once seeing the intended participants of the match).

so finally, they came out and began playing. i decided to take the opportunity of their warmup to take all of my pics cause i wasn't sure quite how much longer they would be out there. and i tested a new feature on my camera, apparently i can take continuous photos for a while (as evidenced by these three pics here)...

ok, so i know you're all anxiously awaiting my take on this traditionalistic event. personally, the only thing i took away from watchin the match is that the ball kids are the funniest thing ever to watch. i don't know how much they actually show of them on tv, but these kids are genuinely amusing. the unintentional comedy scale is OFF THE CHARTS. first of all, they always stand at attention when not doing anything, they're gophers for the players between games, they hold the ball straight above their heads when they're presenting it to the player (and they have the ultimate death grip on the ball whilst they do this) and, of course, the first few steps of the net kids are AWESOME. especially since they all have that awkward teenage look.