While looking for good day trips outside of Sarajevo that weren’t Mostar, I found one that I was really excited about that went to East Srpska and Western Serbia. Bosnia and Herzegovina is very interesting, politically – even from the name, it’s easy to tell that it defines itself as multiple different segments, under one umbrella. Geographically, Herzegovina is the southern part, which includes Mostar, and then the north and east are considered Bosnia. There are also two political entities. One is the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the other is Republika Srpska. Srpska often identifies more heavily with Serbia, both in their flag and their traditions. It made for a very interesting day trip, because we got to see very different parts of BiH and we had a guide for this portion, so we could ask lots of questions.
The landscape felt a lot like Colorado as we headed out of Sarajevo and headed to our first stop, Visegrad. The bridge was originally built during the Ottoman empire and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. After walking across it and admiring the town from the bridge, we boarded a boat to get a better view!
Once we had taken it all in, we headed into town. Part of Visegrad had been built as a film set, called Andricgrad. It had very strange vibes – kind of Truman Show, with the appearance of an “old town” but clearly brand new.
One of the other interesting things we saw in Srpska was this billboard, with their leader, Milorad Dodik. We had asked if there were going to be any celebrations for the 30th anniversary of the peace treaty, and our guide shook his head and told us that things were still tense. In my understanding, Dodik had attempted to enact new laws that were challenged by the courts, and the courts in the Federation also responded by sentencing him to prison. He responded that he would not recognize their decision and was attempting to rile up the population in Srpska to support him against the Federation. Things seem to be settling down again now – the news articles aren’t more recent than March, when I was there.
Our next stop was the Dobrun Monastery, which Wikipedia informs me was built in 1343. Its location along the banks of the river was very scenic.
After that stop, we crossed into Serbia! We ended up getting lunch at another film set town. Is it odd they have so many film sets in this tiny part of the Balkans? This was designed to look like a traditional Serbian village for the film Life Is a Miracle. I found it to be more charming than Andricgrad, personally.
Once we’d had lunch, we headed into Tara National Park to go to a viewpoint. Unfortunately, the farther we got on the road, the icier it got, until we went down a hill and then weren’t able to get up the next one. Which was fine, we would just turn around…. except, we couldn’t get up the hill we had just come down, either. Our guide told us to get out of the car (me, Grace, and a Polish woman who was on the tour with us) and he tried to get it up the hill. And then tried, and tried, and tried. All told, it took about two hours where we were stuck on the side of the road, waiting for our car. A huge thank you to all the lovely Serbians who stopped to try to help us and wait with us!
Luckily, the car did get unstuck, and we got down the mountain again and back to Sarajevo! It was certainly an adventure. I will want to go back to Serbia, as I’d like to see Belgrade and Nish and a few other places, but I will never forget my first time.
I first visited Bosnia and Herzegovina on a day trip from Dubrovnik, when I went to Mostar. I loved it immediately – it was one of the highlights of a whole month of travel, and I was eager to go back to experience more of the country! As it turns out, I ended up getting to come back sooner than I expected, in a long weekend with a friend of a friend who I only met when she showed up at the Airbnb. Alan, our mutual friend, ended up having to pull out of the trip at the last minute due to a skiing injury. While it was a bummer not to get to experience the trip with him, I still had an amazing time!
I had most of the first day by myself, since I landed at 11 am (after an extremely tight layover) and then Grace didn’t arrive until dinner time. I started by wandering around the city center. The airport is a bit of a haul from the city. I wanted to take the bus, but it was infrequent and I would have had to wait for a long time, so I ended up sharing a taxi van to the city center with a few other travelers. Once you get there, though, almost everything is walkable, with one historical site as an exception.
Walking around the Old Town is very cool. The architecture is beautiful and I loved looking at all the shop displays, with the Bosnian tea sets and carpets and handicrafts. Grace and I didn’t do much the first night beyond figuring out dinner and getting settled in, but we got up early the next morning to see as much as we could!
We started with the Latin Bridge, which is one of the most important historical sites of the 20th century. This is where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, which kicked off WW1 and led to millions of deaths. It’s such an unassuming place. It was very strange to stand there and think about how consequential it once was.
From there, we headed up to the Yellow Fortress, which had great views of the city! Luckily, the weather wasn’t too hot, because it did take a few steep hills to get there.
Sarajevo has a very dark recent history, and the museum options are plentiful but depressing. We ended up going with the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide, which was a very good overview of the conflict and resulting genocide in the 90s. I knew a little about it, but not that much, and Grace and I ended up staying there for a long time reading through all the details and watching the videos of what life was like during the Siege.
It was so recent. This November will mark the 30th anniversary of the peace treaty between Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia, which means that pretty much any adult that we spoke with lived through the war and the genocide and the siege. As I’ve said before on this blog, I love to see when a place is resilient and manages to thrive after such horrible circumstances, and Sarajevo is an incredible example of it. The marks that were made on the city are still evident, from a few collapsed buildings that have never been rebuilt to evidence of mortar shellings, like the “Sarajevo roses” in the sidewalks where the holes were filled with a red material.
I spy at least three mortar shell scars on this building
After lunch, we continued with the historical tour, which did require a taxi. We wanted to go to the Sarajevo Tunnel, which is also known as the Tunnel of Salvation or Tunnel of Hope. It’s located back near the airport, pretty far out from the city center. It was worth the journey, though – very interesting to see how they got food and supplies into the city despite the blockades. I can’t imagine how harrowing it must have been in the dark under the threat of sniper fire and bombings.
With that, we called it a day, and had a really nice meal and drinks at a local restaurant. We had scheduled a tour for the next day, which deserves its own post (stay tuned), but it meant an early morning to make sure we had time to experience the full itinerary.
For our final day, Grace had more time than I did, so she managed to swing a day trip out to Mostar! I was heading out at 3 pm, so I had another quick walk around the city, trying to see some of the areas that we had been driven by but hadn’t had a chance to walk through, like Veliki Park and along the river.
I also managed to make it to another one of the museums I was very interested in, which was Gallery 11/07/95. It is a photo gallery of the genocide. The audio guide was excellent. They had several short films that did a great job illustrating what it was like to be there during the war. It was so impactful and moving. I am glad we did the museums in the order that we did, though, because I think this one benefitted from the knowledge I had gained up to that point. It allowed me to spend more time reflecting on what had happened vs. piecing together timelines and the progression of the tragedy.
After that, it was back to the airport for another set of flights. In this case, Sarajevo to Istanbul, Istanbul to Cairo, and a night at the airport hotel before a morning flight to my next destination.
If I ever intended to rank the countries I’ve visited, Bosnia and Herzegovina would definitely be up there for me! I’ve really enjoyed both of my visits. The culture is friendly, the landscapes are beautiful, and they do such a good job presenting their history and how it fits into the broader regional conflicts that were occurring throughout the fall of Yugoslavia.
I don’t have that many photos of Lyon, partially because we spent most of our time there at one museum and partially because it was raining pretty hard when we arrived. After two weeks of going through a heat wave, it was a relief to feel the cooler air on our skin. It had felt as though the heat wave had been following us across the continent.
We started by heading up the funicular to Fourvière Hill, which has an old set of Roman ruins as well as a couple very nice churches. It might have been a more fun area to explore if it hadn’t been raining so hard – it didn’t seem like a lot of things were open, so we worked our way back down to the main part of the city. We had a great lunch back on the bottom of the hill and then headed to our next site.
Most of our time was spent at a museum I had found online, which was Musée Cinéma et Miniature. This managed to capture two things I love! I find movie behind-the-scenes to be fascinating, and I enjoyed seeing all the different aspects of props and mannequins and costuming that creates so many of the famous characters of pop culture. They had a really cool section on Wes Anderson that had a whole section about how they filmed Asteroid City, and the elaborate sets that it takes to get those perfect aesthetic shots. The top floor was dedicated to miniatures, which were SO cool. I’ve always loved those kinds of dioramas – the Art Institute in Chicago has a great room of them, which was one of my favorite sections. These were beautifully done.
After the museum, we really didn’t do much. The next morning was a very long day – we were getting up early so that we could take a TGV back to the Paris airport and then board a flight to head back to DC. Plus, we had to repack, because the advantage of taking trains is that you don’t have to worry about the strict luggage limits or liquid rules, and so we had to get ourselves back into compliance.
Overall, I liked what I saw of Lyon. It had a nice energy, and it is absolutely somewhere I would spend more time on a future French itinerary. Also, it was a very nice change of pace to have French pricing for food instead of Swiss pricing for food on the last day of our trip!
Once we left Vaduz, we headed to Zurich! The train ride across the country from Sargans was absolutely gorgeous. I was immediately impressed with the landscapes in Switzerland.
The view from Sargans train station!
We didn’t end up spending much time in Zurich. Ultimately, we weighed it against the other places we were going, and we didn’t feel like one day in Zurich would do it justice, so we felt like our time would be better spent in the smaller cities on our itinerary. That said, we did walk along the water and it was beautiful. The next time I visit Switzerland, I’ll definitely give myself a little more time to explore.
With our first full day in Switzerland, we headed to Lucerne! We started in the Old Town, walking across the famous Chapel Bridge and visiting the Lion of Lucerne, a somewhat controversial monument within Switzerland that’s located in a quiet garden.
From there, we got on the first ferry we could find and took it a couple stops to the charming town of Weggis, on Lake Lucerne. We sat near the water and had lunch (and watched the birds try to work up the confidence to steal our food), and overall had a lovely afternoon. The app that we had been using to organize our train tickets also worked on the ferry, and it was so smooth.
On our way back to Lucerne, we stopped off at one more location on the ferry. If you know Sam at all, it should not surprise you that he had read about the Swiss Museum of Transport, and he was interested in going. The museum seemed hella expensive, but I came around on the prices once we’d experienced it – there were a ton of exhibits and they were done really well, covering all different types of transport and appealing to a lot of interests.
The next morning we headed to Bern, the capital of Switzerland. Bern has about a third of the population of Zurich and is one of those capitals that everyone forgets, which of course made me more interested in going. And it delivered – it felt delightfully quirky. They’re obsessed with their symbol, the bear. Our hotel had paintings of bears doing all sorts of activities, like playing poker and drinking beer and rock climbing wearing harnesses. And when I researched what to do in Bern, multiple sources assured me that I couldn’t possibly go to Bern without going to see the bear pit. So we went to see the bear pit.
The Old Town in Bern was very charming. I loved their giant clock tower in the middle of the city. There were lots of cafés and restaurants and shops, and we had a nice time walking around through the streets and exploring. It also felt like a manageable size. We didn’t need to go to seek out any particular area to feel as though we got the vibes of the city.
Bern is also where we tried Swiss fondue for the first time! Well, it wasn’t Sam’s first time. He’d been to Switzerland before. But I was pretty excited about the prospect.
The next day, we crossed into French Switzerland. I’ve always found the multi-lingual aspect of Switzerland to be particularly interesting – and while we didn’t cross into the Italian or Romansh areas, I would be interested in that on a future trip. I did love seeing the culture and the architecture changing slowly as we move from East to West. We went as far east as Bratislava and then made our way steadily west all the way to Lyon, which meant we covered quite a large swath of Europe laterally. Some themes across their history were repeated in museum after museum, but we also got to watch as the different histories collided and morphed from one culture to another. It was such a cool trip.
We started with the train down to Lausanne, where we stored our luggage. This was more of a pain than I expected, since the locker situation in Lausanne station was woefully inadequate for a city of their size. Nonetheless, we managed to find a solution, even though it required several extra buses (and no, I’m not salty about it at all, why do you ask?).
Once our luggage was settled, we made our way over to Montreux and Château de Chillon. There’s so much along the shore of Lake Geneva, and I’m sure we could have spent several days in that region alone, but as always, we had to prioritize. We made a quick stop to say hello to the Freddie Mercury statue and then headed to the castle!
Château de Chillon is one of those castles I’ve wanted to visit for years, and its views of Lake Geneva were stunning. Even with the grey and rainy weather, the castle was gorgeous, and the inside is so well preserved.
And with that, our time in Switzerland came to an end. We spent our last night in Geneva and had one more fondue dinner, which was even better than the one in Bern. For as much as we saw, I know there is so much more that we couldn’t get to, and I have a long list of places I’m interested in when I eventually make my way back. The prices are high, but as long as you prepare for the sticker shock, Switzerland is an excellent destination with a lot to offer. I’m glad we were able to go as part of this trip.
There we were, in our hotel room in Innsbruck, and Sam asked me what I knew about Liechtenstein. Not much, I admitted. I was intrigued by this tiny country tucked in between Austria and Switzerland, and I’d researched what kinds of things there were to see there, but I wasn’t particularly familiar with their history. So we did some research!
Liechtenstein was founded by the Liechtenstein family, who bought the land in order to have a vote in the Holy Roman Empire. Basically, they needed land that didn’t have an intermediary feudal lord, and this small stretch of land fit the bill. Shortly thereafter, the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved, but the Liechtenstein family kept the land and it was one of their many castles. They didn’t visit particularly often.
It wasn’t really until the years leading up to WW2 that the Liechtenstein family took a look around at what was happening in German-speaking Europe. And they did not like what they saw. They started moving their money and resources out of Vienna and the rest of Austria, and moved into their castle on the hill in Liechtenstein. Then they asked Switzerland to help them stay neutral through WW2, which worked! They managed to keep their sovereignty and preserve the microstate.
This includes historical and recent satellite pictures of every town in Liechtenstein, which underscores their size
Liechtenstein also has a strange relationship with democracy and civil rights. Wikipedia calls them a “semi-constitutional monarchy,” which might be underselling it. In 2003, they adopted a new constitution after two referendums were put to a vote. One of the referendums was called the “Constitutional Peace Initiative,” which was intended to amend the constitution to restrict the prince’s powers, and this failed by a vote of 83.44%. The other, which passed by 64.32% of the vote, was called the “Princely Initiative” and gave the prince power to dismiss the government, nominate judges, and veto legislation. The BBC has said that Liechtenstein is effectively an “absolute monarchy” and the Venice Commission has said that the new constitution is “not compatible with the European standard of democracy.”
The Prince watching over Vaduz from above
Liechtenstein has the dubious honor of being the last country in Europe to allow women to vote. Women’s suffrage was finally approved in 1984. While we were there, the National Museum had a celebration of 40 years of women’s voting! While it’s absolutely wild to see such a recent year on that milestone, the exhibit was really well done. They went through the entire timeline of women’s suffrage, including important decisions on related feminist issues, and there was a section across the hall where people could respond and make posters about voting and having a voice.
Learning all this gave us a fascinating visit to the National Museum! I am always interested in the stories that countries tell about themselves, and Sam and I had a great time reading through as much as we could from the museum. It was even better for Sam since he can speak German. We also went to the Treasury, which was mostly Fabergé eggs, but had maybe the coolest entrance of any museum I’ve been to where they gave us a coin that unlocked the exhibit. We made a quick stop to the Postal Museum as well, then got some lunch and made our way into Switzerland.
Liechtenstein is tiny, but its unexpected history made it way more interesting than I’d thought it would be. I learned a lot in our brief, museum-filled visit, and I’m glad Sam and I took the time (and the multiple buses) required to visit Vaduz.
From Salzburg, it was about two more hours on the train and we found ourselves in Innsbruck! Austria and Switzerland were amazing for transportation – the fact that Swiss trains run on time should surprise no one, but there are also apps in both Austria and Switzerland that allow you to simply take whatever train you want, turn it on as you board, turn it off as you exit, and the app will calculate your fare, applying any discounts or fare caps that you might qualify for. We had booked a few things in advance, but not everything, and it was amazing to be able to just figure it out as we went.
Innsbruck is stunning, right next to the mountains. I wanted to do some sort of day up in the mountains while we were in Central Europe, and while I’d originally expected that would be in Switzerland, there were several good options in Innsbruck. One option is visiting the ski jump, but we opted instead to take the gondola up to Nordkette!
It starts with a steep funicular up the mountain, and then two gondolas until you get to the top of the mountain. From there, you can take a short walk to get to the peak. It was a bit windy but the views were stunning, and we were happy to get out of the heat for a little while. Throughout our entire trip, we seemed to be following a heat wave across Europe – it wasn’t until the very last day when we had grey skies and rain.
From there, we had lunch at the restaurant at the top and worked our way back down the mountain, taking the two gondolas and then the funicular. It was quite crowded, and we waited in fairly long lines at each stage. Luckily, it didn’t feel too crowded up at the top once everyone had spread out, but we were glad we weren’t in a hurry to get back down to the city.
What we saw of Innsbruck was lovely, although we spent comparatively less time in the city. I think it would have been interesting to go to a museum here, in Tyrol, as I could feel the cultural shift in Austria as we moved from Vienna to the comparatively less urban regions, and I would have liked to get a sense of how they viewed their national identity as well. But there were still many museums ahead of us on this trip and the mountains were calling.
This was our last full day in Austria! I loved Austria – I would absolutely go back. It has the natural beauty of Switzerland but for much more reasonable prices, and so many towns and cities came up in my research that looked like they would have been fun to explore. Hopefully I can make it back at some point soon. Our last few hours in Innsbruck, though, were spent researching our next destination: Liechtenstein! And it turned out it was a lot more interesting than we’d expected.
….with the sound of music! It is so funny to me that Austrians are generally unfamiliar with The Sound of Music. Coming to Salzburg and making a pilgrimage to the filming locations has been on my bucket list for longer than I even knew what a bucket list was. Somehow, the movie never caught on in Austria, though, so they regard the tourists who are recreating Do Re Mi on the steps with bemusement.
It was a two and a half hour train ride from Vienna, so we arrived in mid morning. After dropping our bags off at the hotel and grabbing a quick breakfast, we headed to Mirabell Gardens! It was a beautiful stroll through the park, although it might have been more pleasant if we weren’t in the midst of a massive heat wave. From there, we worked our way over to the Hohensalzburg Fortress on the top of the hill.
The fortress provided me with one of my all time funniest moments in a museum. We were in a section on military history, and it was going through various weaponry, regalia, and other details about Austria in various wars. We got to a whole room on WW1. I’m always fascinated to see how various parts of Europe reflect on WW2, and I leaned over to Sam.
“I wonder what the next room will say about their military history,” I said. And then we walked into the next room to find…. A brand new exhibit on the Middle Ages! Are you interested in the recipes they cooked? The lutes they played music on? We just skipped all of the Austrian military history after, say, 1918, and we never went back to it. It was Middle Ages for the rest of the tour. I’ve decided that’s my new favorite segue when I don’t want to talk about something.
The city managed to feel both quaint and lively. My favorite area to walk around was over by the university, which felt a little more laid back. We had lots of good food options and ended up taking a bus out towards the outskirts of town to an Indian restaurant, which was fun to see a different area outside of where the majority of tourists were congregated.
Salzburg officially wins for fanciest Foot Locker, by the way. I was stunned to see the corporate logo above the door.
Salzburg had been on my list for so long, and it didn’t disappoint! I liked Vienna, but I loved the rest of Austria, and I would absolutely go back and explore more of the countryside and the smaller towns and cities. The next morning, we boarded another train and it was off to Innsbruck!
Because we had a few days in Vienna, we had time for a day trip to a surrounding area. And Bratislava was on the top of my list! There aren’t many places where there are multiple world capitals that close together, and it was an easy hour long train ride to get there. The train station isn’t the most convenient to the city center, so we also took a bus to get closer.
It’s not a huge city. Slovakia only has about five million people across the whole country, with about 730,000 of those in the Bratislava metro area. Old Town is particularly compact, and that’s where most of the tourist sites are. We felt pretty content with a day in Bratislava, although I think you could extend it if there were more museums you were interested in. If I was going back to Slovakia, I would focus my attention on the national parks in the eastern side, which look gorgeous.
If you’re picturing Bratislava, it’s likely that you’re imagining the castle on the hill. We started our day there! It had a lot of exhibits. We started in the basement section, which had more of the history as well as the foundation of the castle. From there, we headed up, where there were additional exhibits on military history and artwork. We were starting to reach our limit of museums for the day, though, and we wanted to see more of the city, so we went back down the hill and into the city center.
Bratislava was the farthest east we got during our trip. As we headed back west, we had the chance to start to draw parallels, from the castle we saw in Luxembourg to Bratislava and to the fortresses that we found on hills in Salzburg, Vaduz, and Lyon. And while we all know about the history that shaped this region in the 20th century, we got a chance to see multiple exhibits across multiple countries about the Romans and much earlier eras of history that replicated across the continent.
It also had a lot of charming cafés, some nice street art in the form of statues, and the types of winding alleyways that seem like they’re straight out of a fairy tale. While the main area was a bit crowded with tourists, it was easy enough to find a quiet side street as well.
All in all, Bratislava was a charming and convenient day trip from Vienna, and definitely worth a look if you’re in the region. It’s not the most exciting capital city, but it was pleasant to spend some time in. I’m always interested in new regions and new places when I travel, so it was exciting to get a taste of Slovakia!
I have been to Austria before this summer, technically. When I visited family in Germany, we walked across the border and went to a café and had a pastry. I’ve counted it as my 7th country visited, right between Germany and Finland. But I’ve always known that I wanted to come back and explore, because Austria has a lot to offer!
From Paris, Sam and I flew to Vienna. We originally wanted to try the night train but it sold out too quickly. It was a bit of a strange time to be in Vienna – I hadn’t realized it when we’d booked, but it was meant to be the same dates that Taylor Swift was in town. At first I was glad we had found a reasonably priced hotel but worried everything would be crowded. Then, when the concert was cancelled due to the foiled terrorism threat, it morphed into a different worry. Huge shout out to the Austrian authorities for figuring that out and preventing the attack!
This isn’t my best picture but it does show one of the many Taylor Swift related discounts that the shopkeepers in Vienna offered!
It didn’t impact our trip, really. It meant a few areas were more crowded, and instead of tourists taking photos, it was sad would-be concert goers exchanging wristbands and singing in the streets. The stores were offering discounts to anyone who presented a concert ticket, usually at 22% as a tie-in to Taylor Swift. It was sobering to think that something tragic could have happened while we were there, and a little ironic for it to happen immediately after we left the massive international event that is the Olympics.
Anyway. On to Vienna! This was one of our more chill stops – most of what I wanted was to experience café culture and explore some of the neighborhoods. After so many busy day trips out of Luxembourg and the excitement of the Olympics, these were a few days to rest and enjoy being in a beautiful city before we went back to traversing through Central Europe by train and switching hotels every night.
The amount of pictures I’ve taken of ceiling domes is probably excessive but look at it!
Vienna is known for its museums – so much so that there’s actually a whole district devoted to them, called MuseumsQuartier. If I’ve learned anything from living in DC, it’s that it’s all too easy to get museum’d out, so we picked the one we were most interested in and started there – the Museum of Austrian Contemporary History, which covers their history starting in 1918. The museum was housed in the Hofburg in Heldenplatz, which was a gorgeous building!
In love with these haunting pictures of abandoned checkpoints rendered obsolete by Schengen and Free Movement
Austria has a bit of a complex relationship with its recent history, as, I suppose, any German-speaking country in Europe might. This was a theme throughout our trip. When we were buying our ticket, the woman actually asked us if we realized this museum wouldn’t have any history from before 1918, seemingly confused why we would want to go to this one. It was fascinating – Austria seems to want to have a dual narrative of WW2, in which they were both completely innocent of any actions taken by the Nazi regime and also that they were never conquered as a nation. The two ideas seem to be at odds, yet both are present throughout their telling of history.
I’ve heard travelers debate at length about whether Vienna is boring. I think there is a sense that everything functions as it should, that all its edges have been worn away and replaced by public parks and efficient transit and more cultural institutions than you could ever hope to see in a single visit, and that it makes Vienna somehow less interesting than places that are less organized.
I love this federal government building tbh
Was Vienna my favorite place we went to? No, but I liked it a lot. And if you told me I had to pick somewhere to live in Europe for a few years, Vienna would be among my top choices. There’s something very pleasant about being somewhere where things just sort of…. work. I also had an excellent time in the rest of Austria (more on this soon!) and would love to return at some point to see more.
I have loved the Olympics for as long as I can remember. It’s what drove me to try figure skating and gymnastics as a child (both unsuccessfully, I might add). I love everything about it – learning about the random sports that I didn’t know existed, the international camaraderie, the inspiring stories of overcoming the odds to make it to the world stage. The memory of the Beijing 2008 Opening Ceremonies will forever be seared into my brain. I’ve always wanted to go to experience it live, and when I found out it would be in Paris, one of my all time favorite cities, in 2024, I booked the tickets immediately!
I went through the official hospitality website for our tickets, where I selected a package that included the hotel stay and two events, along with transportation around the city. From there, I added on two more events for the time frame that we were looking at being in Paris, so we had a total of four events across three days and two nights. We minimized the time we spent in Paris that wasn’t directly related to the Olympics, although it turned out that’s what everyone was doing and it was actually really pleasant to be in the city doing the tourist activities during the time we did have!
When we weren’t at Olympic events, we did a lot of sightseeing! We went to Musée d’Orsay to get in some culture, went up to Sacre Coeur, and wandered through as much of the city as we could within the time we had. We even managed to meet up with a few friends for meals. Sam had never been to Paris before beyond spending the night in a horrible hotel near the train station after one of his connections was cancelled, so I was excited for the chance to show him how amazing the city can be.
Plus, it was all decked out for the Olympics! I loved all the signs featuring their mascot reminding guests to recycle, and the rings and logo almost everywhere you looked. The train stations had signage on the floor leading you to the lines that you needed to take to get to the venues. It was also cool to get a glimpse of some of the “behind the scenes” components – I loved the “official timekeeper” buses we passed right next to the Seine.
Our first event was Track and Field. I truly could not have picked a better event to start at. First of all, we had an awesome lineup. We had seven events: Men’s 400m semi-final, Women’s Hammer Throw final, Women’s 400m Hurdles semi-final, Men’s Long Jump final, Men’s 1500m Final, Women’s 3000m Steeplechase final, and Women’s 200m final. The night started out with a few medal ceremonies, which was cool but we couldn’t see much from the angle of our seats, and then the competition started!
Beyond the actual events that we saw, though, Track and Field is one of those events that feels like the quintessential Olympic experience. In the US, at least, it always makes primetime coverage, so it’s one that I grew up watching, and it’s also very clear who the winners and losers are. There’s not much background you need to understand it. We saw the races that my friends and family were talking about the next day. We saw Olympic records being set and races that were decided by photo finish. It was incredible.
Also, there’s something about seeing all of these sports live that lets you appreciate just what it takes to do them. Yes, I know they jump really freaking far in the long jump, but seeing the setup in person emphasizes it so much better than on TV. The hammer throw, too – watching how far those women could throw across the field was amazing. The athleticism on display was so spectacular across the board!
Before they start their attempt, the climbers all get a chance to take a look at the course and map it out in their heads, which was so fun to watch
The next morning, we headed out to an entirely different part of the city to go to our next event: Sport Climbing! Climbing was introduced as an Olympic sport in Tokyo in 2021, along with surfing and skateboarding. Of the three, I thought surfing was cool (although it was held in French Tahiti on the other side of the world for these Olympics), skateboarding was kind of lame (although they did a much better job with the venue in Paris, what I saw on TV was a lot more exciting this time around), and climbing was cooler than I expected it to be.
In Tokyo, they had it as one combined event, with three scores evenly weighted: Bouldering, which is how many short “problems” you can solve in a given time frame; Lead, which is how far you can get up a very tough course before falling; and Speed, which is a set course that climbers get up as fast as they can. Speed climbing is kind of a different entity, and there isn’t much overlap between that and the types of climbers who excel at the other two components, so they did a smart thing and separated those out in Paris. Our set of events was the Men’s Lead semi-final and the Women’s Speed final, which also included the quarterfinals and semifinals because they go just that fast.
Climbing was a great spectator sport. While the physicality is important, there’s also an element of strategy and problem solving on display, and watching the climbers back-to-back meant we could watch how different athletes approached the various sections. Also, the stakes are high – they only get one attempt, and a fall off the wall means they’re done.
And then, when we got to speed climbing… I saw it once before on TV, at the Tokyo games, but holy shit. It is unreal. That photo above this paragraph is the final times of the gold medal run for the women. Watching them scramble up that wall in under seven seconds seemed impossible. If one finger or toe missed one hold, they were out of the race.
Also, these were objectively our best seats. Setting aside that I know that from their category, their location, and their price point, we got another clue…. I ended up sitting right behind someone famous! Specifically, Chris Sharma, who I have been informed is rock climbing royalty.
Did I know who he was, when he sat in front of me? Of course not. I think climbing is cool but I don’t follow it regularly. As a matter of fact, when he first sat down, he was a little late and so I had held out a sliver of hope that maybe the seat in front of me would just be open only to have that hope dashed. And he’s reasonably tall. Which is not a trait you want in the person sitting in front of you in a crowd.
But my slight annoyance quickly turned into intrigue when a woman with a microphone came and pulled him out of the crowd to do an interview in the middle of the session. As soon as there was a break in the action, people from all over the arena were coming over to shake his hand, and get photos with him, and have him sign autographs. They were telling him how much he had inspired them. Finally, I turned to the guy on the other side of me, who clearly knew things about climbing, and I asked him.
“So, is this guy a big deal, in the climbing world?” I said.
“Yeah, he’s actually… he’s kind of the biggest deal?” he replied.
Later, when I sent a photo to a friend of mine who does follow climbing, she confirmed his name (which I’d figured out from Google but did want to verify) and told me that he was “the Brad Pitt of climbing.” Even if I couldn’t fully appreciate his level of celebrity in the moment, it was really cool to feel as though we were present for something important. To learn more about the history of what I was watching, one hastily searched famous rock climber at a time.
From there, we headed to our next event, which was Diving!
The diving arena looks extremely close to the stadium, except it’s actually a 40 minute walk away. Don’t ask how I know this.
I love watching diving on TV, but I found it a little harder to follow in real life. I’ve realized that I don’t actually know that much about what makes it good, and I really like seeing the slow motion shots and where they draw the angles over them – which, surprise, don’t feature in the live prelims of the event. It was cool to see an aquatic event, and helped add to the diversity of the types of athletic events that we saw, but I don’t think I appreciated it as much as I could have if I’d known a bit more about the sport.
From there, we headed back into the city to check out the Clubhouse 24 in Palais de Tokyo! We had access through the hospitality package, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I thought it was really cool. When we came in, they gave us a welcome snack and drink, and then we got to explore their various Olympics exhibits. We even got to meet our new fav, the Paris 2024 mascot!
Obsessed with the hat mascotYep, those are the anti-sex beds
Definitely worth the visit, especially if you’re an Olympic nerd like me. The food court was pretty good as well, and we grabbed dinner there. They had lots of viewing areas set up as well, but we had a long day ahead of us the next day and opted to head back to the hotel instead.
Our final event of the trip was Rhythmic Gymnastics! We went to two rounds of the Individual All-Around Qualifying. Note – only women do Rhythmic Gymnastics, and there are individual and team events.
This one hasn’t taken off as much in the US, mostly because we’re not historically very competitive at it. Of all the Olympic sports, this has always felt the most like dance to me, so I’ve always loved it. At the very least, I know what to look for, even if I don’t know the names of all the elements and the difficulty levels. And they’ve started letting them use more fun music, which makes it a lot more entertaining.
We saw them do two rounds, the ball and the hoop. They also have to compete with the ribbons and the clubs, which was the other session later in the day. Sam said he would have been happy with only one round, but I felt as though I was back in one of the dance competitions in my childhood and absolutely could have kept watching!
But alas, our time at the Olympics had come to an end. We had a few more hours to do visit a few more tourist sites, and then it was back to the airport to head to our next destination.
I had the most amazing time at the Olympics. It was, without a doubt, one of the best experiences of my life, and I am so beyond grateful that I got to experience it in all its glory in Paris. It was a true bucket list item for me and it managed to live up to all my expectations. Next up, Sam and I continue the journey with a flight to Vienna and then a journey back to Paris by train and the occasional bus!
