Olympics - US Wins the Gold! (and country 12 - France)

As you all now know, we ended up being super fortunate. Not only did the US women make it to the finals of the Olympics football (er...soccer) tournament, but they won!

It was super cool to be at the game.

On the morning of the game we drove ~2 hours to Brussels. We checked in to a hotel across the street from the train station and then hopped a train at 1:30 from Brussels to Paris. It was a Eurostar, so it went 185mph and got to Paris in 75 minutes.

My biggest worry about the Olympics was getting from the main train station to the stadium. They don't allow cars to go to the stadium, so taking a cab wasn't an option. It turned out to be easy, though. There were lots of helpers at the train station to help us figure out what tickets to buy, where to go, etc. We got on the subway and as we got closer to the stadium the subway filled up with more and more people. Then we had to walk about 1.5km from the subway to the stadium, which was very busy given the number of people going to the game.

At the game we had quite good seats. We were at approximately midfield on the second level.

Here are the teams during the national anthems.

US played Brazil and we were lucky since my brother's girlfriend (hi, Suzi!) is from Brazil so we felt we could cheer for both teams. It seemed like the stadium was 40% Americans and 30% Brazilians. But....the cheering seemed to be about 40% Americans and 60% Brazilians. Those Brazilians are passionate!!

It was hot in Paris, but we were lucky to be in the shade for the first half of the game. We had brought an American flag with us, so when we were in the son we used that as some shade which actually helped quite a bit.

It seemed to us that neither team played that well (maybe because of the heat??). The US team had ~6 good plays and the Brazilians had ~10 good plays and it seemed like good fortune that one of the US plays resulted in a goal that won the game for us.

It was great to be able to be there for the medal ceremony. You can see that in the background on this shot if you squint (a very long podium with three teams on it).

After the game we walked back to the train and glimpsed a familiar site along the way.

It was a bit crowded getting back to the main train station, but then we took the Eurostar back to Brussels (assigned seats!) which worked out really well. We got back to Brussels around 11:15, went to bed, got up the next morning, had some Belgian waffles for breakfast, and then drove home.

Brussels was the city that was the hardest to drive in of any we had visited. If google maps said "turn right in 50 meters", the road would split into 4 different rights and it would be almost impossible to figure out which one we were supposed to take. We did several u-turns - more than we did in any other town.

Overall it was a great experience and we decided the only thing we would change is we would bring more food. It was too hard to get out of our seats during the game - there was almost 0 legroom, so going past everyone in our row was super tricky - so we couldn't go get food during the game.