I moved to Japan from North Carolina with my husband and our young daughter in the spring of 2022. My husband is in the US military and this has been his first overseas assignment.
20.08.2024 - 17:44 / lonelyplanet.com / Paris Olympics
Aug 20, 2024 • 0 min read
With the close of the Paris Olympics, a running joke on social media is that many viewers have been at a loss of how to fill their days.
After all, for two weeks, the French capital became the center of the world, hosting what has been lauded as one of the most successful and innovative games over the last few decades. Between superhuman feats of athleticism, there were tears of joy and tears of disappointment, all against the stunning background of the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Palais and the Seine river. It made for some dramatic and captivating television.
But the excitement isn’t over — these next few weeks are a short intermission until the Paralympics, which run from August 28 to September 8. The opening ceremony will take place outdoors at Place de la Concorde. Events will be held across some of the same venues that made the Olympics so mesmerizing, including Pont Alexandre III and the Eiffel Tower.
Demand for tickets has also taken off following the close of the Olympics, with locals looking for a way to prolong the collective euphoria experienced throughout the Games. After a slow start, organizers say that sales for the Paralympics average about 1000 tickets an hour, and that events in the most iconic venues — Versailles and Grand Palais — are sold out.
While Paris has hosted three Olympics, this year marks the first time the city is hosting a Paralympic Games. Along with innovative solutions for travelers with disabilities, perhaps the biggest legacy of the Paralympics will be how it’s served as an accelerator to make the cityscape – often described as an obstacle course for travelers with disabilities – more accessible and inclusive through improvements to city infrastructure and transportation.
To enhance the spectator experience among the estimated 280,000 visitors with disabilities, organizers are introducing a few innovative services that will also mark a few firsts for the Paralympics.
Attendees of events – like blind soccer, wheelchair rugby and wheelchair basketball – who are blind or visually impaired will be able to follow the action with a tactile tablet Touch2See that offers a live-action, immersive experience. A moving magnet replicates the position of the ball in real time and the tablet vibrates to convey the intensity of the game. Likewise, audio descriptions fed through headsets provide precise information about the plays. Spectators with visual impairments can also use low-vision headsets that look like VR headsets and act like high-powered binoculars, to zoom in on the action for athletic competitions and for the opening and closing ceremonies.
In an Olympic first, the audio description service will also be available via the Olympics app, allowing
I moved to Japan from North Carolina with my husband and our young daughter in the spring of 2022. My husband is in the US military and this has been his first overseas assignment.
You might assume hosting the Olympics is great for a city's economy thanks to an influx of visitors staying in hotels, dining out, and enjoying the sights.
Travellers from outside the EU are getting ready for the launch of the new Entry/Exit System (EES) on 10 November, but are Schengen countries ready to welcome them?
There’s never a bad time to go to Paris, and Air France agrees, giving away a pair of roundtrip flights and a wardrobe incroyable so travelers can live their best French lives.
“The pavements are often narrow and cluttered. There’s always either a badly parked bike, dustbins, or dog waste,” says Virginie Dubost, a wheelchair user and disability consultant who lives and works in Paris. Recently, when coming out of a museum, she got stuck. “The pavement was very high, and it was complicated to turn around,” she tells me.
When Los Angeles–based designer Clare Vivier began decorating the 19th-century house she'd bought in her husband's hometown of Saint-Calais, in France's Loire Valley, she had a particular aesthetic in mind. “I love color and patterns but wanted something peaceful, so the intention was to create a dialogue between those two things,” she says. She wanted the house to have a blend of contemporary pieces, antiques, and textiles from heritage maisons to create a space that, much like her namesake handbag and fashion label, channeled both California fun and French sophistication. She also knew that she wanted her longtime friend Kate Berry, a designer and creative director, to help her make it happen.
On a cloudy morning in Senegal, surfer Babacar Thiaw paddled through a sea of plastic. That day, he was the only local in the lineup at his home surf spot of Virage on the coast of Dakar, where his father first opened a surf shack in the 1970s. As he marveled at the barreling brown waves riddled with trash—and travelers—it hit him: “They’re just here for fun and will leave, but I’ll be here forever,” he thought. “Am I going to be condemned to live in this environment for the rest of my life?” Fast-forward more than a decade, and you’ll now find Thiaw making his own waves as the owner of Copacabana Surf Village, a surf shop, zero-waste restaurant, and a hub for sustainability initiatives like beach clean-ups and youth surf camps with an eco lean.
Spain’s beach towns are at a bursting point. Protests have filled streets from Barcelona to Malaga this summer, with residents demanding that tourists go home.
Hostels are my preferred option when I'm traveling alone.
British Airways is spending $9 billion to lift its reputation after years of slumping popularity.
Aug 23, 2024 • 0 min read
Hawaii has often been the go-to for Los Angeles residents who want a warm, sunny beach getaway (with a recent heavy focus on how to do so ethically). But what if we were to tell you that you can actually fly to parts of the Caribbean from Los Angeles faster than you can fly to parts of Hawaii?