Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Playing soccer in Paris


I'm just back from a dinner party in the close suburbs of Paris, precisely on a little island called L'île Saint Germain. This place used to be a pretty bad neighborhood when I was young, but now it's a great place to live in. They even have a real soccer field, where I took this pretty cool photo just a few hours ago. Playing soccer in Paris is pretty easy, as long as you belong to a club; there are 32 "real" outdoor fields around Paris,  75 smaller ones and 5 indoor fields.

9 comments:

  1. Are the bars to keep the fans out or the players in ?! It must have indeed been a tough neighborhood.

    ReplyDelete
  2. LOL Stuart! One thing is for sure though I obviously don't have many soccer fans among my visitors!

    ReplyDelete
  3. You have at least one 'soccer' fan, although we hardly ever call it soccer in the UK, we call it football. This despite the term soccer originating in England where the modern rules for football were drawn up by the Football Association. It was called 'association football' to differentiate it from 'rugby football', soccer being an abbreviation of 'association'
    These days we mostly just use the terms 'football' and 'rugby'

    Well that's filled up the comment column a bit. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Merci Drummond, I appreciate your effort ;-))

    ReplyDelete
  5. For some reason (even though I am not a soccer fan) one of the things I remember most vividly from my first trip to Paris, was being able to see a soccer game in action at night from the top of the Eiffel Tower. It just wasn't something that I expected to see, so it's something that's stuck with me over the years.

    ReplyDelete
  6. You have another soccer fan. Sorry, fellow Americans, but it's just so much more fun to watch than our football—and less risk of brain damage for the players!

    ReplyDelete
  7. is this where David Beckham just signed to play?

    ReplyDelete
  8. @Justine. " one of the things I remember most vividly from my first trip to Paris, was being able to see a soccer game in action at night from the top of the Eiffel Tower." True, there is a soccer field very close to the Eiffel Tower. I bet a lot of real estate people have plans for this space...

    @Alexa "and less risk of brain damage for the players!" True. Generally (French) soccer players's brain was ALREADY damaged before they started playing...

    @Anne "is this where David Beckham just signed to play?" I don't think so ;-) but I can tell you he's all over the news!

    ReplyDelete
  9. I had no idea there were so many soccer fields there....you learn something every day!

    ReplyDelete