RHIAN SOCCER JOURNALS           

TENNIS AND BIRTHDAY                    12th May 2011

I am sorry that I have been so delinquent in not writing more journals in the last little while. I was hoping one of my teammates was gong to step up and write one for me... I am still waiting.

It was my 29th birthday today, and I am having trouble digesting this. When did I stop being in my mid 20's? Anyway, a happy birthday to my twin sister Sara. It is hard not being able to spend the day with her and family, but I am happy that we managed to talk for a while.

The internet service is not great at the hotel, and the whole squad finds this unbelievably frustrating. We get some reasonable service in the evenings, and I sometimes manage to Skype. For my birthday, I managed to talk with Kristina and my unbelievably cute nephew Zachary. This was probably my best gift of the day, together with the Twix bar I was given.

We trained in the morning and then had a team outing in the afternoon. Our coach used some of her sports connections to get us into the top level tennis tournament going on in Rome. I really enjoy tennis and had never been given the opportunity to attend a top level event. So  cool.

Even though the biggest name players were all in action in the evening, we still had the chance to see some great matches. We saw part of the match between Fish v Cilic, part of the Canadian Nestor and his partner versus two Italian gents, and part of the Bryan brothers versus two other fellas. It was all an excellent athletic spectacle.

The day was extremely hot, so even though the tennis was fun to watch, we were very ready to head back to the hotel and the AC in the car. All in all, this was a great birthday.