We weren’t sure about the rules for photography at the French Open so we only brought my little camera on the first day. Once Eric witnessed the massive camera gear hauled around by various spectators (and got over his lens envy), he decided to bring our Rebel XT on the second day.

Turns out they allow just about anything in, including food and drink, hallelujah!

Maria Sharapova and Dinara Safina getting ready to start their match…

As you can see, our seats were almost directly in the center. It was a completely different view because on television, the camera are situated behind the players.

It was cloudy all morning and even though we were hoping for the best, it just wouldn’t be the French Open without a rain delay.

Thankfully, after the (relatively short) hour-long rain delay we had sunny skies for the rest of the match.

This match went down the wire, three hard-fought sets, including two tie-breaks!

See more Roland Garros photos in our Paris Flickr photo set.

A quick update while I am connected to some sketchy internet on the fourth floor balcony of our Barcelona apartment.

Roland Garros was wonderful, we got to see several doubles matches but the highlights were definitely the Sharapova vs. Safina match, which Safina won 6-7, 7-6, 6-2, and the Djokovic vs. Gulbis match, which Djokovic won 7-5, 7-6, 7-5.

Court Suzanne Lenglen… we had some pretty nice seats!

Djokovic going for a net shot, this match was just awesome. I posted a ton more shots on Flickr.

Me, acting like a cheesy tourist… there’s Novak in the background!

Today I got an email with all our French Open tickets attached! Hooray!

The first thing I did was translate the entire ticket since it’s in French and I needed to know why all the tickets have my name on them when they clearly show an illustration of someone checking IDs. Turns out I just have to change the names online and they will be registered correctly in the computer when the ticket is scanned. Check.

My next challenge was to find a good seating chart so I know where we’ll be sitting. Apparently, the organizers for Roland Garros have something against straightforward information about just where exactly your seats are. I could only find zone colors, no mention of the other qualification, OB/NB, on the tickets.

After looking all over the official website and various other ticketing aggregators, I decided to just make my own seating chart (hopefully helping out a few other folks) combined from several maps I found.

Behold!

So now I know where our tickets are!

(Here you go, Mom.)

June 2, 2008 (2 men’s singles/1 men’s doubles) - OB, Row 20, Seats 4, 6, 8, 10
June 3, 2008 (1 men’s singles/2 women’s singles) - NB, Row 5, Seats 60, 62, 64, 66