http://timesonline.typepad.com/rafael_nadal/2007/06/the-italian-din.html

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Tuesday, June 26, 2007
The Italian dinner at my house
 Hello everybody again.

Yesterday I finished the blog leaving for dinner to El Cambio de Tercio. A
friend took some pictures there with his camera but still hasn't sent them to
me so I am waiting to receive them so that I can post one or two here and
keep the others to me. Hope this wakes him up :-)

 Day two of my blog here at Wimbledon and the one just before my first match
on this year. Well, it should be the day of my first match but I heard, I
think it was my uncle Toni who told me it might rain tomorrow again. This is
probably one thing I don't like here, the weather. It is just boring to be
here waiting to see if we can practice. I love to practice and I love to play
so to sit and wait it is just boring. Today I could get some practice, my
first practice at 3 pm on an indoor court. Then it stopped from raining and I
could get another hour on the normal outside court on grass. I hit today with
Davydenko for that, over 1 hour 30 minutes and I can say that I felt good
hitting the ball.

 But today it was also a special funny day since at the Wimbledon house we
are staying, we had a so called "Italian Night". The story is that back in
Roland Garros, Vitto from the ATP organised a dinner in my house and invited
some people for dinner. Vitto is Italian and works for the ATP. I think this
is his 29th Wimbledon and has seen and organized a few of these dinners. He
always tells these stories about the dinners with Panatta and other players
and agents.

The fact is that he organized this dinner and Giorgio, another guy who works
for the ATP was the one in charged of the cooking. We were 9 for dinner
tonight. Me, my uncle Toni, Giorgio, Vitto and Thomas from the ATP, Rafa
Maymo and Benito from my team, and Albert Costa and Toni from Feliciano's
team. Feli did not stay for dinner since he went out with his girlfriend and
some friends in Wimbledon. He did come though for the end of the dinner.

The fact is that Giorgio cooked a fantastic pasta for dinner. Linguini with
mushrooms and gambas for me and for the rest the same but with tomatoes and
"zucchini". They also had another one done with Mushrooms and zucchini only.

I don't like the tomatoes so he had to do a special one for me. The food was
really, really good. I had a HUGE dish of pasta.

In the picture you can see the "mess" of the cooking by Giorgio and in the
other one it is me doing a cake. That's what you can see on the picture. We
also prepared a surprise for Albert Costa since today it was his 32 birthday.
The other day I cooked a cake for all of us staying at the house, so I
decided to cook another one today and give Albert a surprise. Benito had gone
to buy the eggs, sugar and the candles and I prepared two cakes.

They came out pretty well and at the end of the dinner we turned down the
lights and sung the Spanish version of the Happy Birthday (Cumpleaños
Feliz). It was a surprise, as I say, for Albert and he told us he liked it
very much. During the dinner we talked about many things: football, of
course, as you can imagine Spaniards and Italians having dinner, one of the
main conversations must be football, right? :-) We also talked about tennis
history and facts and some other things.

I left around 11.30 to write this block and I am going to finish watching a
movie so that I go to sleep. I am watching "El Padrino (The Godfather)". I
always watch a movie when I go to sleep. Not that I watch it all, but I start
or finish watching them and that makes me go to sleep always.

As I say I start playing tomorrow so I will go in the morning to do the
warming up (weather permitting as they say here) and get ready for my match.

Since I am writing this blog for as long I stay in competition here, I hope I
will write the blog tomorrow and Wednesday.

Muchas gracias!

Rafa