Flying in yesterday I looked down at the suburbs of Paris as the Air France Airbus approached CDG airport. We were only a few thousand feet up by then, and it struck me how similar the landscape below looked to almost any other one in what can loosely be called the "western world." For all the prejudices and habits and convictions of all those people down below, they're far more similar than different and you couldn't tell an ant colony in France from one in Melbourne, or Phoenix. Oh, the roofs may be a different color, the houses long or tall, the playing fields layed out for soccer or baseball, but the grid is strikingly similar, the roads drawn like the familiar lines on the face of someone you know well, houses shoulder-to-shoulder just back from the gray asphalt or pale gravel that leads from one artery to another, water tower to gas station to industrial park.
I was waiting for my bag when I glanced over to the windows and saw a girl in a striking, tres-chic red head scarf waving her arms: MarieJ, our TW poster-of-the-year, who had come to pick me up. No sooner did I step out of customs than she rushed up and said, "You missed it, Djokovic had a real warrior moment today!" She filled me in fully as we rolled down the Peripherique, toward Paris.