Paris 2024 - Day 10 (July 26th) - Free day

Today, we have a free day. The Opening Ceremonies are this evening, but we decided that we did not want to sit along the Seine and watch barges full of athletes go by without being able to see all of the other parts of the Ceremony going on. While we always enjoy the Opening Ceremonies, we are glad that we skipped this one because the weather forecast is for thunderstorms. But free does not mean that we are just sitting around our Airbnb. Beth, always on the lookout for cultural things to do, has booked us tickets to the Palais Garnier – home to the French National Opera. The Palais was built in 1669 by Louis XIV and has a capacity of just under 2,000 people.

Beth had bought audio guidebooks for us, but Sean and I both found that the guidebooks, although it has all kinds of information about the architects and which was the Phantom of the Opera’s box, forces you to be at a certain place at a certain time, turn in a certain direction and generally makes the experience much less spontaneous. Here are some of the pictures that I took:

So much beauty! It was really a spectacular place. It is about 1 PM when we finally get outside. Since we have time, Sean would like to go to the Centre Pompidou, even though we don’t have tickets, since it is not far away. To sweeten the deal, he gets on his phone and finds us a highly rated Vietnamese restaurant that is particularly known for its Bahn Mi sandwiches. It is a really tiny and popular place. We have to sit outside and dry our seats off from a recent shower, but the sandwiches were great!

The Centre Pompidou, more accurately known as the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou, opened in 1977 and was named after Georges Pompidou, who was President of France from 1969-1974. It was built in an architectural style known as high-tech architecture and was universally hated when it opened. The outside looks like a building still under construction and built out of the tubes used for gerbil runs. Since it opened, it has grown on people and is one of the more highly visited museums in Paris. There was no problem just walking in, but the security people asked that I wear my backpack on my stomach to avoid knocking artworks over. This made it difficult to take pictures. We visited two exhibitions, the first on mostly art from the late 18^th to early 19^th centuries. I really liked the neo-impressionists and abstract artists like Mondrian. But the best part of the top floor was the view: 

We also went to a special exhibition on the design of children’s furniture. Sean stops in the bookstore and buys a book on Architecture. It is still a little drizzly when we get done so we head to the Metro and go home. But before I go, I get this picture of the air conditioning ducts:

There is something like 50 restaurants within a mile of our Airbnb so figuring out what to eat for dinner is tough. We aren’t very hungry and don’t want to miss the Opening Ceremonies, so we go for quick and light. We walk around for a while before deciding. One interesting thing in Paris is that there is no problem with having your restaurant next to another serving the same type of food. We see side-by-side sushi restaurants and another street with at least 5 creperies. But tonight, our choice is a Lebanese restaurant. While we are waiting for our food, we ask the owner what he thinks about the Olympics and he tells us that it is so bad, this is the last night before he closes the restaurant and goes to Lebanon for a month. He says that he normally gets his food for the day about 7-8 AM, but now, because of security concerns and road closures, his food is arriving at 2-3 AM and unlike normal, there is no chance of getting a second delivery if he guesses wrong on demand. Too bad, because the food was good enough that we would have considered coming back a second time!

The rain picks up just as we get back to our Airbnb. We are really glad that we do not have to go back out to go to the Opening Ceremonies! Beth is watching the Opening Ceremonies on the TV, which happens to be in our “bedroom” while I work on my pin project of keeping track of all of the NOC (National Olympic Committee) pins and trying to figure out whether they are legitimate or not. There are so many pins! Every so often, Beth will call me to look at part of the Opening Ceremonies. It is really tough to figure out what is going on in a foreign language. Among the parts that I liked were Zidane (one of the great soccer players of all time) carrying the torch through the Metro, the guy that we are calling “death” rowing his rowboat through the catacombs of Paris, the subjects of the paintings in the Louvre jumping out of their paintings and running around, the Minions sinking their submarine with javelins (although it is not clear to me whether they belong to the “story” of the Opening Ceremonies or are just added in for no reason) and the horse galloping down the Seine. By the way, we think that the figure riding the horse is Sequana, Goddess of the Seine and daughter of Bacchus, God of Wine. After the fireworks, the Eiffel Tower lights up:

I’m sure that this ceremony will be viewed by some as controversial, but the purpose of the Opening Ceremonies is for the host nation to introduce itself to the world in the way that it wants. And this ceremony was typically French. Steps for the day: 12,594.