Paris 2024 - Day 27 and 28 (August 12th and 13th) - Paris to Cupertino

Day 27 – Paris

When we are still in town at the end of the Olympics, we usually fly out the following day. But since we’re retired, we decided that we would take a day to pack in leisure and walk around with nothing particular to do. This sounded good in theory, but it is going to be in the mid-90’s again today and being on a jet where it is cool is sounding pretty good! The only thing that we have scheduled today is to see if we can get into the Olympic superstore on the Champs Élysées. We go over to our favorite patisserie for breakfast and find that they are closed on Mondays. I had wanted to go into the Gare de Montparnasse to see if it would be easier to shlep our suitcases to the Metro Line 13 tomorrow morning than going to the closer Gaité station where we know we’ll have to carry our suitcases down two flights of stairs. So, we pick up our breakfast there instead. It turns out that if we can get past the crowds getting on trains, we can take a combination of elevators and escalators to get to Line 13 if we go into the Gare.

I don’t have any pictures, but when we arrive at the superstore, there is only a 20ish person line as opposed to hundreds. I even trade a couple pins while we are waiting! Inside, I find a Paris logo t-shirt that I like, and Sean buys a couple of small gifts to bring back to his friends (refrigerator magnets), but Beth doesn’t find anything that she wants. Outside, we take in the view along the Champs Élysées in both directions that we were not able to see when the security barriers were in place.

We head back to the Airbnb and begin to do some packing until it gets to be lunch time. We decide to go into the mall across the street where we are sure to find air conditioning! Their food court is really interesting. There are ordering kiosks at each of the entrances. But instead of ordering from a single restaurant, you are ordering from dozens of restaurants. 

After completing an order and supplying a cell phone number, you receive a text message telling you that your order is ready. This is much easier for the individual restaurants because they don’t need to deal with the payment details. All they need to know is the name of the person or cell phone number of the person who placed the order. This also means that these restaurants need to hire fewer people – usually only a cook and a server, which makes it economically possible for very small shops to take advantage of places like this. It will be interesting to see if places like this pop up in the US.

After lunch, we kill some time walking around the mall and buy some chocolates to bring home for us and for gifts. Then we head back into the heat which seems a 100 times worse coming from an air-conditioned place. We do a little more packing and I try to take a nap to make up for how little sleep I got last night. Finally, the heat in the apartment gets to be intolerable so we head back to the same food court to get cooled back down until it is time to eat dinner. We take a really, really long time to eat (finally getting the French style of eating!) before going back to the Airbnb, opening all of the windows and trying to stay somewhat cool. It is another really long night. Steps for the day: 9,878.

Day 28 – Paris to Cupertino

After two days with little sleep, I’m beat and can’t wait to get out of here. Fortunately, our flight to San Francisco is in the early afternoon and it will take us more than an hour to get to Charles De Gaulle airport, so we are leaving for the airport right after breakfast. We roll out our suitcases, say au revoir to our favorite security guard and put the room key back into the lockbox on the traffic island outside the Airbnb. Then we go into the Gare de Montparnasse. We are slightly after rush hour, so we don’t have any problems getting through the train station, down the elevator and escalator and into the Metro. Now that the Olympics are over, there are not many people in the Metro, and we are able to get seats instead of having to stand.

The connection between the Metro and the airport is really efficient, and it is a short walk to the check-in counter. Along the way, we see the Iranian wrestling team checking in to their flight. I had been hoping that I would run into some athletes or officials with pins in their bag. I couldn’t really wear the whole pin vest, but I did have my hat and a lanyard with a bunch of pins on it in case I caught someone’s eye who wanted to trade. We get to the gate and the gate next to us is boarding a flight to Taipei, Taiwan. I really want the Taiwanese NOC pins so I make multiple passes past their gate hoping that one of the many athletes on this flight will want to trade. Unfortunately, while a few look at my pins, no one has any pins to trade in places they can access them.

Our flight home was uneventful except for the fact that I started running a fever during the flight. I had been having a cough and a runny nose for at least a week and I had put it down to the poor air quality of Paris air and my seasonal allergies. But once I developed a fever, I knew that I’d managed to catch COVID again and it was likely that Beth and Sean had it as well. Fortunately, we wore masks the entire flight and I hope that we were able to keep anyone around us from getting it.

Despite how it started and ended, this has been a great trip. The French people were great hosts, and we saw enough French culture and history to want to go back again sometime. Now, it is time to start working on my Italian for the Milan 2026 Winter Olympics! But before I go, I thought that I would post a few of my favorite Olympic pins:

I wish that I had all of these (I’m working on it!). Which ones do you like best? Anyway, I hope that you have enjoyed this blog and will tune in again in two years. Step for the day: 9,102. Total steps in Paris: 208,361 or about 98.4 miles!

Paris 2024 - Day 11 (July 27th) - Men's Handball

My apologies. Despite making notes as I went along, I somehow forgot an entire day! It wasn’t until I got to the end and found that I was on the wrong day that I realized what had happened. Must have been a senior moment. While I can’t recall everything, I do have some details and pictures from the day. I hope that you enjoy them!

Today’s event is men’s team handball. Before I went to the summer Olympics the first time in 1996, I had never heard of team handball and I’m guessing that a number of you may not have heard of it either. So here is what you need to know. Team handball came into existence in the early 20^th century in Northern Europe, and may have been used to help football (soccer) players stay in shape during the long, cold winters. It is played on a 40 x 20 m court (about the size of a basketball court). There is a goal, which looks like a small soccer goal at each end and there is a 6 m (20 ft) arc drawn around each goal. Teams consist of 7 players (6 field players plus a goalkeeper) and play with a ball that is about the same size as a volleyball. Players can pass, dribble or shoot and will have to dribble or pass every three seconds. Only the goalkeeper can use their feet. No one except the goalkeeper is allowed in the 6 m arc, and any player trying to shoot on goal closer than the arc has to jump before entering the arc and shoot before they land. There is a lot of contact outside the arc and the players tend to look like American football linebackers.

Today’s event is men’s team handball at Paris Arena Sud 6. Here is the view from outside:

Each of these colors are long, skinny display screens. It really looks cool in the rainy weather we have today and probably looks even better at night.

The first match is between Spain and Slovenia, and we see some familiar referees:

If they look similar, they should. They are identical twins Charlotte and Julie Bonaventura from France, and they are one of the top referee pairs in the world, equally at home refereeing men’s or women’s games. We recognized them because they called one of the games that we saw in London in 2012. Then, it was a major news event for women to call a men’s game, but now it is no big deal. This is partly because of how well they control the game.

Slovenia jumps out to a 11-8 lead after the first half against the higher ranked Spanish team, but Spain comes back in the second half led by their best player Daniel Fernandez and wins 25-22. In the second game, we have Egypt vs Hungary. Even though Egypt has been the top African team in the last 7 continent championships, no one is quite sure how good they are against the best teams from Europe. It turns out that they were pretty good. Led by Yahia Omar and Ahmed Adel with 9 goals each, Egypt led 19-15 at half time and maintained the lead to win 35-32. Here are some of the pictures that I took:

Every time I watch a handball match, I wish that I had known about this sport when I was younger. It looks like it would have been a lot of fun to play! Steps for the day: 8,355.

Paris 2024 - Day 26 (August 11th) - Women's Weightlifting/Closing Ceremonies

Today is the final day of the Olympics! I can’t speak for Sean, but Beth and I are tired and ready to go home. But before that, we’ve got a doubleheader – women’s weightlifting in the morning and the Closing Ceremonies in the evening.

Weightlifting starts at 11:30 AM so we have a leisurely breakfast at our favorite patisserie and then head one more time toward Paris Arena Sud. On the Metro, we have a nice conversation with a woman from England who is going to the same event and is hoping to see one of their athletes win a medal. Today’s event is the women’s superheavyweight division. These are some big women:

All of these women weight at least 97 kg/214 lbs and some of them weight a lot more. You can see from the uniforms that this is another sport where athletes from all over the world can compete. We’ve got athletes from countries as small as Samoa to as large as China. Looking around, there are a lot of fans from China:

That’s because the overwhelming favorite in this contest is Li Wenwen from China. Her best result is nearly 40 kg higher than anyone else in the field. Like all weightlifting events, there are two events in one. The first is the snatch, where you pick up the weight and put it directly over your head in a single motion. The second is the clean and jerk, where you left the weights to shoulder level and then lift it over your head as a second step. If an athlete is successful in at least one of her three attempts in the snatch, then they go on to get three tries at the clean and jerk. Ranking is decided by the sum of the best of the two types of lift.  In the case of a tie, the athlete with the lower body weight wins.

Going into the event, each athlete has selected the initial weight they will try to lift. The contest progresses starting with the lowest weights, and there is a lot of strategy to when athletes will increase their next weight in order to either force a competitor to lift when they aren’t ready or to get a little more rest before trying their next lift. Here are some pictures from the snatch portion:

After the snatch, Li is in first with 136 kg/300 lbs with Park Hyejeong from Korea, Emily Campbell from Great Britain, Lisseth Ayovi Cabezas from Ecuador and Chaidee Duangaksorn from Thailand rounding out the top 5. But my favorite is Naryury Perez Reveron from Columbia. She is the women in the top right of these pictures. I like her because she is the lightest woman in this competition, so she is working at a serious disadvantage. She also likes to yell at the weights to fire herself up before attempting a lift (which is what she is doing in the picture!).

As the clean and jerk start, it is clear that Li is likely to win, Park is probably going to get the silver medal, and Campbell will get the bronze medal. That prediction is confirmed after Lisseth fails in her last clean and jerk at 162 kg and Emily succeeds in her first lift at 162 kg. But both succeed in my book because they both set personal bests. Unfortunately, Naryury was injured making her second clean and jerk and could not continue. Wenwen’s total of 309 kg/681 lbs is well below her best, but she wins the gold medal. Hyejeong’s total of 299 kg is also a personal best and she wins the silver medal. Here are some pictures:

Since this is our last event, we decide to wait for the medal ceremony. There were too many Chinese fans going nuts to get a picture of the podium, but here is a picture of the flags:

The Paris Arena Sud complex has a small Olympic store, so we go inside to see what is available while waiting for the crowd to disperse. Beth gets a t-shirt, but Sean and I don’t find anything that we want. We had decided beforehand that we would find a place around here to eat our main meal of the day. I suggested that we go to the Columbian place that we went to previously, but Sean wants to go to “someplace new” and finds a Peruvian place that is about a 10 min walk away. As we approach the restaurant, we pass a guy in a suit standing next to a limousine. I didn’t think anything more about it until he catches up with me and hands me a plastic tote bag. After we got to our table, I look inside and see a fan, an umbrella, a small bottle of water, a USB drive, a key ring and some literature. All of them contained evangelical religious information. I am ready to just throw it out, but Beth says that she’ll keep the bag temporarily to shlep stuff around.

The food is really good, and the portions are gigantic so we’re happy this is our main meal for the day. I’m surprised that the food is not spicier. Most of the dishes have some combination of potato, corn, tubers, quinoa, beef, pork and chicken. I have something called Ají de Gallina which is a creamy chicken stew served over rice. Yum!

After lunch, we walk back to Paris Arena Sud and there are only a few people around, which means that the Metro station is empty! The trip back to our Airbnb only takes about 15 minutes. Beth and I take the time to begin packing our suitcases even though we have all day tomorrow to get ready for our flight.

The Closing Ceremonies begin at 9 PM so around 6:30 PM, we make our way to the Metro for the longer trip back to Stade de France. There are already quite a few people walking around and the cafés nearby are packed with people that are looking for better, cheaper food than they’ll get at the stadium. The locals are FINALLY starting to get somewhat interested in pins and I make a couple of trades. But it is really the volunteers who are most interested. I come across a group of volunteers who are from all over the world, and they are all interested in pins from their countries, but with one exception, they want me to just give them a pin. I give each of them a pin from my giveaway pocket.

Here is the view from our seats:

We are not sure what to make of the white plastic in front of us, but we do have a great view of the orchestra! There are people from all over the world near us – we see people from Mexico, Canada and Holland just within a row of us as well as many, many locals. Sean and Beth go to get us sandwiches for dinner while I take photos. The orchestra arrives:

I’m still trying to figure out what is going on in the field, now that compressed air is causing the white plastic to balloon up, when Beth and Sean come back with food. The Ceremony starts with a medal ceremony for the women’s marathon which took place this morning. In what is likely the most amazing performance by a woman runner ever, the gold goes to Sifan Hassan from the Netherlands. It is not her winning the marathon that made it amazing, it was the fact that Sifan also medaled in the 10,000 m and 5,000 m races earlier in the Games. Incredible! Tigst Assefa from Ethiopia wins the silver medal and Hellen Obiri from Kenya wins the bronze medal. Shortly afterwards, the athletes begin to arrive:

I’m generally prefer the Opening Ceremonies because it is the beginning and an opportunity for the host city and country to introduce themselves to the world, but while some of the teams are still pretty intact, it is wonderful to see that many of the athletes are mixing with new friends from around the world. Hopefully, their stay in France will change how they view the world. This is the power of the Olympic movement: bringing the world together to compete in peace!

With the athletes in place (or as in place as the people responsible for cat herding can make it), the lights go out and the orchestra starts to play. I don’t pretend to understand half of what I see, but there appears to be some sort of celestial being who brings the idea of the Olympics first to the ancient Greece and later to the rest of the world. This is when we realize that the large white areas in front of us are actually continents. We see groups on each continent come together and begin to build what will end up being Olympic rings. Once built, the rings are raised to the top of the arena. Here are some pictures from this part of the show:

The next section has a bunch of bands. We hear from Phoenix and Air, which we understand are iconic French bands. It is hard to get any good pictures but here is one:

The final part of the performance is Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee declaring the Paris Games closed and calling on the youth of the world to gather in four years in Los Angeles. Then the major of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, hands the Olympic flag to President Bach who then hands it to the major of Los Angeles, Karen Bass. Here is a picture:

The next section is produced by the Los Angeles Olympic committee. Now I’m not a big fan of the “culture” of Southern California, but we get Tom Cruise repelling into the stadium, taking the flag and driving a motorcycle through the streets of Paris to a plane which takes him to Los Angeles. He skydives into the mountains above the city and hands the flag off to local Olympic athletes and they finish on Venice Beach with performances from H.E.R., Billie Eilish and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

No one really wanted to leave after the Ceremonies, so we are stuck in place for a while before the crowd finally starts to leave. This is our fourth time at Stade de France, so we know what to expect – the crush of crowds heading to the RER B station. But we are pleasantly surprised to find that the Metro line 13 station is open to outbound spectators, so the trip home is much quicker than our previous visits.

The high temperature today was 95F with high humidity, so the apartment is really hot when we get back just before midnight. Even with all of the windows open and the fan blowing at the end of the bed, it is a long time before we cool down enough to sleep. Steps for the day: 9,878.