Paris 2024 - Day 24 (August 9th) - Taekwondo

Today, we are off bright and early to the Grand Palais to see taekwondo. Fortunately, the trip to the Grand Palais is only about 15 minutes, so we grab a croissant at our “local” patisserie and then hop on the Metro. We get off at the Invalides station just like we did for archery. While we could normally walk across the bridge to get to the Grand Palais, that is not how it works during the Olympics. In order to separate the incoming spectators for the two events, we walk down the Seine to the next bridge. Across from the bridge is the Assemblée nationale:

This is the home of the lower house of the French legislature, the equivalent of the US House of Representatives. Then we head across the Pont de la Concorde. This was the start/finish area for the men’s and women’s triathlons. Here is the view from the middle of the bridge:

The Place de la Concorde is directly in front of us as we come off the bridge, but we can’t see it because it is part of the venue for skateboarding/breaking/3x3 basketball and is surrounded by barricades. We have a very nice walk along the Seine as we head back toward the Pont Alexandre III that you can see in this picture. We turn onto Avenue Winston Churchill to the Grand Palais.

The Grand Palais is a Beaux-Arts exhibition hall built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900. Here is a view of the interior:

Pretty cool! I really like these “reused” venues and hope that the trend will continue. The brand-new modern facilities are nice, but these add a little culture and greatly decrease the costs of hosting the Games.

I don’t think that I’ve talked about the rules for taekwondo so here is the short course. Taekwondo is Korean and translates as the way of foot and fist. Matches consist of up to 3 rounds of 2 minutes each. Contestants wear outfits equipped with pressure sensors on their torso and head. You can get 1 pt for a punch to the torso, 2 pts for a kick to the torso, 4 pts for a turning kick to the torso, 3 pts for a kick to the head, 5 pts for turning kick to the head and 1 pt for a penalty on your opponent. There are a variety of penalties, but the most common are punches to the face or punches or kicks below the waist. I should also point out that just touching the head or torso is not enough. The punches or kicks have to be hard enough to register on the pressure sensors.

We’ve got two groups fighting today – preliminary rounds in the women’s under 67 kg and men’s under 80 kg. Besides the constant action, the reason that we enjoy taekwondo is that athletes in almost every country can compete. In this session, we see athletes from Mali, Kazakhstan, US, France, Cote D’Ivoire, Hungary, Egypt, Spain, Belgium, Dominican Republic, Fiji, Jordan, China, Nigeria, Thailand, Brazil, Serbia, Uzbekistan, Chile, South Korea, Iran, Italy, Burkina Faso, Australia, Tunisia and Denmark. We also get to see an athlete from the Refugee Team. Here are some of the pictures that I took:

Some of the matches were pretty big mismatches, but the matches where the two competitors were evenly matched were really great. You could see that it was only really small differences between the athletes who went on to compete for medals and those that were eliminated in the round of 16.

After the event, we had tickets for the Louvre. But before that, we get this view of the Petit Palais across the street:

The Petit Palais was also built for the Universal Exposition of 1900 as a kind of bookend to the Grand Palais across the street. Unlike the Grand Palais, which has had a kind of varied history since this Exposition, the Petit Palais was always going to be an art museum afterwards. Today, it houses the City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts. There are too many museums and too few days left for us to visit, but we hope to see the inside on a future trip.

According to Google, the Louvre is only 2 km (1.2 miles) from the Grand Palais along the Seine, but we are not allowed to exit the venue in this direction because it would interfere with the spectator flows into the other Olympic venues. So, we have to take a 3-mile detour and approach the Louvre from the back. Eventually, we see these:

The first is the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel which was built in the early 19th century to celebrate some of Napoleon’s victories. The second is the statue of Joan D’Arc. Joan of Arc is the patron saint of France, was born a peasant, became a military commander in the 15^th century and eventually was burned at the stake by the English.

Just beyond Joan’s statue is the Musée du Louvre:

The Louvre is one of the world’s most famous museums and we have all been looking forward to our visit for a long time. The pyramid leads to the entrance area and is surrounded in almost all directions by other parts of the museum. Inside are entrances to the three largest parts of the museum. Sean has very different interests from Beth and I, so we agree to meet in the entrance area later.

The Louvre was originally built in the late 12th to 13th centuries and eventually became the residence of the Kings of France for about 150 years starting in 1546. When Louis XIV built Versailles and moved there, the Louvre hosted the royal collection, and it has been a museum ever since.

We start in the “main” wing of the museum. This is where the Mona Lisa is located. We don’t have any interest in seeing it, but it is easy to avoid because you just go where the crowds don’t go. We start out in the near eastern and Islamic sections. It is easy to get overwhelmed because the Louvre just has so much stuff – more than 500,000 pieces! But we rapidly become dissatisfied because the labeling is almost entirely in French and in many cases is not detailed enough to learn anything about a particular piece or even the region and time period it comes from. It feels more like they are saying. “Come see our stuff. We have a lot of stuff!” To add to our frustration, the museum is huge, and the maps are not very easy to read. We wanted to go to the African section and after searching for the right location for a while, discovered that it was closed for the day.

We eventually stumble into the Egyptian section. They start with the Roman (think Anthony and Cleopatra) era. It goes on and on and on and ever further back in time until we reach the age before the Pharaohs. Around this time, we get a text from Sean saying that he has had enough (he was having the same complaints we were) and was heading toward the exit. We do the same, but at this point, we are about as far from the exit as we could be. We go upstairs and downstairs through the various buildings and in the underground walkways that connect the buildings always focused on the sortie sign (exit). Along the way, we find some of the original parts of the Louvre and many, many Roman sculptures. I guess that it could take days to fully view the Louvre. Eventually, we get back to the entrance and find Sean. His complaints were similar to ours – too much stuff and not enough education. Oh well, they did have a lot of really cool stuff!

Here are some of the pictures that I took:

Getting out of the Louvre is almost as complicated, as they don’t want the people coming out to get in the way of the people coming in. We eventually find a Metro station and head for home. For dinner, we pick a Chinese/Japanese fusion restaurant where we can eat outside. Sean, after listening carefully for a few minutes, decides that the owners and work staff speak Mandarin. He orders his meal in Mandarin which, as usual, attracts all of the staff to our table to see this Caucasian kid speaking reasonably good Mandarin. It really makes for a good show for Beth and I! Steps for the day: 11,284.