Federer to win Rolex Tennis Masters..... what a DJOK(e)

As if traveling to Hong Kong for less than 24 hours wasn't enough excitement, I attended the Shanghai Rolex Tennis Masters Tournament the next day (Tuesday, October 13).  This was something I had planned to do even before arriving in China and was a greatly anticipated event by many in Shanghai.  Little did I know, Federer is a beloved man here in Shanghai.... but I'll get into that a little more later. Getting to the tournament itself was quite the journey!! They were advertising shuttles from one of the metro stops near the Qizhong Tennis Center (where the tournament was held) on the website, however upon arrival to the metro stop there were very small signs that I almost missed pointing me in the direction of the bus station.  Here, I was lucky to find two foreigners (one who spoke Chinese as well as English) who were headed to the tennis tournament as well.  I had never ridden on a public bus in China, they are rather intimidating because the drivers speak only Chinese, there is no way of knowing where you are unless you have previously looked up the route of the bus, and the buses are labeled in Chinese.  The one foreigner that I met thankfully, was able to read Chinese characters and found the bus we were to get on.  It dropped us off right in front of the center and my god was center court huge!!!! It looked like a football arena from the road.  As we exited the bus, crowds of local Chinese men swarmed the doors trying to sell/buy tickets, which was quite the nuisance.  I made my way through quickly and walked through the entrance and security.  Finally, I had made it (an hour and a half after leaving my apartment).  I had never been to a professional tennis tournament and although this was not one of the slams, and there were only men playing, I was still overwhelmed with excitement.  There were many games occurring at once and at first my goal was to make it to a little bit of all of them... quickly I found out that just isn't possible if you want to actually enjoy a match, so I made my way to where Sock (the American) was playing.  Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to just walk right in while they were playing, we had to wait for a break in play and the security guards didn't quite have the right idea as to when that was.  Rather frustrated, I walked around the area and by coincidence bumped into a very tall body guard of DJOKOVICH!!! He wasn't playing that day but I caught him on the way to practice!  Naturally, swarms of people started to realize who he was and like a mob we followed him to his court just to get glimpses of him practicing.   After this, I went to a different court, which was not too crowded (granted it was during the first rounds, and this wasn't center court).  It just so happens that Gasquet and Muller were about to start and Gasquet being a French man, had quite a large crowd of fans (there are tons of French people in China, especially male engineers).  The match was extremely exciting, Gasquet was favored but Muller put up a great fight.  In the end Muller ran out of gas and Gasquet pulled away in the second set (they only played best of 3).  I walked around and enjoyed some sponsored games and food (PAPA JOHNS ;)  and then settled into center court for the "match of the night".  I am not kidding you there were groups of Chinese people that had Federer shirts, signs, hats, and banners.  I had no idea that they loved him so much.  The best part was the cheers the groups would do that were broken English or just plain Chinglish (poorly translated).  The chairman of the match was getting very frustrated during this match, because they tried to make it more of an entertainment show then a tennis match, and many people were breaking the rules of talking, standing, walking around, during playtime.  The players even complained several times.  Federer's match vs Ramos ended up going into 3 sets and was so exciting!!! I was obviously routing for Ramos out of pure satisfaction of pissing the extreme Federer fans off around me, but he honestly played the game of a lifetime.  In the end, Federer choked and Ramos won 7-6, 2-6, 6-3.  Would you believe that the fans of Federer literally started to cry at the end..... they did, and dramatically too.  I've never felt worse second-hand embarrassment.  I even took videos ha ha ha. There was another match to follow that Tsonga was playing in, but I was exhausted and left early.  He ended up winning easily, so I wasn't too bummed about it.  WHAT A WEEKEND IT WAS!!!! (sorry for the extremely long post) OH and Djokovich won the tournament!