For almost two decades, Dubai’s beachfront was something of a graveyard. Towards Abu Dhabi, you had the partially finished Palm Jebel Ali, which had been announced in 2002. Closer to the marina area, there was the struggling “The World” Islands, which dated to 2003. And towards Sharjah, Deira Islands (the 2004 project now known as Dubai Islands), seemed abandoned.
Why the Paris Olympics Were Worth Traveling For
12.08.2024 - 20:09 / cntraveler.com / Winter Olympics / Paris Olympics
I’m cheering from the banks of the Seine in a plastic rain poncho, my dress soaked and loafers sloshing. The rain has not let up once during the four-hour Opening Ceremony, but as we watch boatloads of beaming athletes float past us one by one waving their national flags, my smile could not be wider. By the time the evening comes to an end, Celine Dion is belting Hymne a l'amour from a glittering Eiffel Tower—some in the crowd cry, others dance, or FaceTime family—and a contagious sense of universal joy ripples across Paris.
From watching Team USA win its first gold medal of the Paris Games at the men's 4x100 meter freestyle relay, to doing the wave at women's beach volleyball in front of the Eiffel Tower, my trip to Paris taught me it's impossible to attend the Olympics without feeling radically optimistic, a side effect of witnessing the world physically come together first hand. At the Opening Ceremony, 53-year-old Jennifer MacKenzie from Vancouver tells me that warm and fuzzy feeling is the “Olympic bug.” She first caught it when the Games came to her home city in 2010.
“I felt like there was nothing that brought patriotism to our country and pride like any other thing that I had ever seen,” she says. Since then, she’s been to nearly every Summer and Winter Olympics. This year, her daughter was able to join her for the first time.
Patrick Nero, 59 years old and from Washington, DC, has been to five Olympic Games. For him, it was Paris’s bold plans to organize the first Opening Ceremony held outside a stadium that sealed the deal on booking a two-week trip to see 10 Olympic events. “That clinched it for me, because it wasn't just your typical ceremony,” he says. “I've been to Salt Lake, London, Sochi. They're all just so different. I think that really is what keeps me coming back, that each one is so unique.”
During the first week of the 2024 Paris Olympics, 1.73 million tourists visited Greater Paris, according to the latest data from the city’s tourism board. Out of those, 924,000 were international tourists—a little more than half. The rest were domestic tourists from elsewhere in France.
Despite reports of locals leaving the city en masse during the Games, there were some Parisians in the crowd as well. Twenty-eight-year-old Emeraude Lauté initially wanted to be “nowhere near Paris during the Olympics” because of how difficult it’s been to get around the city, but decided that watching the Games in her own city was a “once in a lifetime experience” and bought tickets to attend the Opening Ceremony by herself.
“I'm happy to be here with all different people coming from everywhere in the world,” she says. “It's really about having all the countries together—that’s not always easy, especially
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