Paris Olympics 2024

In the early afternoon, I set out to meet Jeff for lunch and scout out potential vantage points to watch the opening ceremony. Getting to Jeff was a bit of an adventure. I planned to meet him near Chatelet station, but one stop before Chatelet, an employee came onto the train and told everyone to get off. I then went to the nearest exit only to be told to go to a different one. I then decided to walk to another line to get to Chatelet. When I got to the platform, I saw another employee clearing people away from the platform. I then decided to look for another exit and walk. While walking, I googled and learned that their had been disruptions to the train network due to an unspecified sabotage.

After lunch, Jeff and I scouted the area we explored yesterday, and we found that we could no longer access the bridges, and the Seine was not accessible either. Perhaps we were naive in thinking we could view the proceedings from there. As it turns out, the bridges were used for performances. We also scouted out the Hotel de Ville which appeared to have a giant screen; unfortunately only ticket holders could access it.

After all this exploring, we reluctantly accepted that we would have to watch the ceremony from our hotel room. This was very frustrating because up until 6pm that day, various outlets were still reporting that the Parade of the Nations was open to the public, but information on where to view it was pretty much nonexistent. In fact, the only useful information I found was a reddit thread with one poster who explained with maps how access to each part of the Seine was organized; the poster’s advice was to abandon hope and watch it on tv.

After our aborted mission, I took Jeff back to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, which we explored together before going back to our hotel to watch the ceremony.

In hindsight, watching the Opening Ceremony on tv was the best option anyway because the spectators could only view what was immediately visible to them, and it also rained heavily. In fact, most of the diving judges who went to the ceremony left early because of the rain. The main thing we missed out on was feeling the energy of the crowd in person. I would also have loved the see the now-legendary Gojira-Marina Vittori heavy metal-opera mashup of Ah! Ca Ira! in person. After the fact, I learned that tickets had been on sale to the general public, but these were only available to French residents.Read more