Sunday, July 28

 As promised, I got some photos of the red turd mascot – both as a hat that people were wearing and as a cartoon.  Also, I forgot to mention that the French national symbol is the chicken, so you also see plenty of chicken hats and chicken costumes.  There also are people scattered around who will put the French colors on your cheek with a lipstick-like applicator.  We happily participated, figuring that the US colors are the same, so what the heck?  

Yesterday was more lines and more security.  Both are very impressive.  I actually had to drink from my “flask” yesterday, so felt happy that all those signs were not main in vain.  There is great signage everywhere …. You literally follow pink lines on the floor or pink signs everywhere.  In most places there are dozens, seemingly hundreds, of volunteers with big foam pink fingers pointing you which way to go.  I’ll try to get a photo of one of those for tomorrow.

Yesterday’s first event was kayak.  We had to travel over an hour to get there but it was a new train and very comfortable.  There was a lovely walk through a pretty residential area and then we arrived at the venue.  I will say that even though the lines are huge, they are pretty good about processing you quickly, with lots of entry points.   Our seats were great and this event was super fun to watch.  We watched the women’s semi-final, with 22 contestants vying for 12 spots in the final.  They go down some rapids and through gates, both downstream and upstream.  You could see how it took both enormous strength as well as concentration to get to the right gate positioned the right way.  You lose time for touching a gate and you lose a lot of time for missing a gate.  There are judges besides each set of gates who decide on the spot whether there is a penalty, which can be reviewed later.  We left before the final as Alain wanted to get to see the first match at the swimming.  

A word about Alain – he is a new friend (an old friend of Guy’s) – and he is the expert amongst us on all-things-sport.  He is so dedicated that he carries an iPad with him to watch other competitions while we are at a live competition, and can be spotted watching at just about any moment.

Our second event was swimming.  We went very early, thinking we would have time for a light dinner but, alas, the line stretched for miles, so we got on it more than an hour and a half in advance, and made it into the stadium only ½ hour before the start.  The food on offer was falafel sandwich or nachos.  We all decided on falafel, of which they ran out before we got to the front, so nachos for dinner.

This is an old stadium, and we climbed some very steep steps (without handrails!) to get to the very top, where our seats were.  I swear we bought better category of seats, but there we were, on the roof.  We couldn’t even see the live video screens from where we were.  That said, we could see the pool perfectly well.  The spectators were very animated – loads of singing and cheering.  The place becomes totally silent when the swimmers mount the starting blocks, then erupts once they are in the water.  The first race was the big one, with local hero Leon setting a new Olympic record in the men’s 400 meter medley.  He was quite impressive – way ahead of the others.  The was a good pace of races, both men's and women's, and different strokes, interspersed with medal ceremonies.  We watched the US win several medals and even got to sing the Star Spangled Banner.

We had a heck of a journey getting home with several Metro glitches (some self-imposed, others not) but eventually made it back to our apartment to collapse after a very full day.