BONSOIR my little friends! It is ME! Yes, me again, your annoying little pal who blogs to no one.
Guess where I am right now? You'll never guess. I'll just tell you. I am in le belle France! Oui, that is correct. I am in the land of striped shirts and berets, pigeons and tiny dogs, baguettes and crepes (just a quick note: that stereotype of the French always having baguettes is actually true. Practically every other person I see is carrying a baguette. Or wearing a scarf).
My dad is here in Nice (in the south of France, right on the Med) for a few weeks to learn French by immersion for his FSO job. My mother came out here with him, so I was home alone for almost a week (heheheh) before my brother and I joined them.
We traveled from MSP to Amsterdam overnight--torture, I'm telling you. Have you ever slept well whilst sitting upright? Didn't think so. Anyway--from Amsterdam, Tom and I flew to Nice. It was sunny, maybe 75 degrees, and BEAUTIFUL. Dad's rented flat is in Old Nice, which is reminiscent of Venice. The buildings are all crowded together, the streets are cobbled, and the shops are all little hole-in-the-wall boutiques that sell useful things like soap, clothes and clay chickens.
The buildings here in Old Nice were all built in the 1600s, and some look like they haven't been repainted since. It's that quality that makes it more beautiful though. To look down one alleyway is like looking at a child's drawing-- the buildings are all shades of apricot and butter, terra cotta and cream, all those completely edible colours. Each window has shutters with cracking paint, avocado and moss and aqua. Balconies have laundry lines underneath them, so if you look up you'll see the sun shining through t-shirts and towels and the occasional pair of plaid boxers (Tommy). I took over a hundred pictures on the first day alone. Jet lagged and tired, we didn't want to do a whole lot of walking, so we ate Italian food that first night.
Nice was founded by the Greeks of Marseille in about 350 B.C. It also had a ton of Roman influence, and that's completely obvious here. We could almost be in Italy (in fact, we did go to Italy later, but I'll get to that in a minute).
Day two started out with a deligious breakfast of pain au chocolate, which is essentially a croissant wrapped around some chocolate. Can't get any better than that. It also involved going to the local market that is set up in the main square every day. There were tons of stalls with fresh veg and fruit, meat and cheese, flowers and art and other cool stuff. There were several stalls with glace fruit (candied fruit) and it was so beautiful to look at that I wanted to try everything. We only tried the cherries, which were delicious.
Later that day we took the bus to Monaco and walked around, ogling the casinos and the hotels, the rich people and the cars. ONE THING ABOUT THE BUSES! The drivers are nuts. They drive these gigantic buses around tiny curves at practically breakneck speed, and there's always people on mopeds or motorcycles, bikes or in small cars that are getting in the way. Traffic is bonkers. Anyway, we stayed in Monaco for the rest of the day, then returned to Nice for dinner with some of Dad's classmates. Afterwards we got gelato for like the third time, only THIS time the gelato was molded in the shape of a giant rose! Almost too pretty to eat.
Day three invluded another trip to the market and another heartstoppingly delicious brekkie of pain au chocolate. Then we took the bus to another little town just like Nice and went on a lovely hike along the ocean. I don't remember the name of the town but it was beautiful. We went to a different town after that- I'm sure you're sensing a pattern here- called Villefrench sur-mer. I can say it quite beautifully in a French accent for you if you wish. This was absolutely gorgeous. Very old, very labyrinth-y.
Day four- ITALY!! If you know me, you'll know that a) I am extrememly proud of my Italian heritage (Panetti, hello, it means bread) and b) I have never been there. I was super excited. Mom and Tom and I took the train to Ventimiglia, a little town right over the French border. That's honestly its only claim to fame. It was kind of a dead place, especially for an afternoon on a beautiful day. Unfortunately kind of a let-down. However we did have an adventure that involved order sandwiches-- on the menu it said salad, pomodoro (tomatoes) mozzarella, and salsa tonnata. We figured tonnata was some sort of tomato sauce, but we were sorely mistaken. It was tuna. And we are not fish eaters. So what did we do? We didn't eat them but paid up and went somewhere else and had pizza. Then gelato. Then cannoli. We basically ate everything typical of Americans in Italy. but WHATEVER it was delicious.
That night I started feeling a little sick, and the next morning I was feeling awful (with some sort of cold/virus) so I stayed in bed trying to sleep whilst dad was at class and mom and tom went off on their own. Later that day I felt better, so we got dressed up and went back to Monaco and went to the casino!! It was worth the ten Euro to get in- we had drinks and watched the blackjack tables and I tried (and failed) to count cards. So cool. I felt like a female James Bond.
TODAY oh TODAY was lovely. It started out as grey and kind of misty, so while dad was in class, Mom and Tommy and I walked less than ten minutes up the hill from our rented flat to these old castle ruins. The castle was built in the 1200s and there wasn't much left, but oh, the view was incredible. There is also a cemetary which is lovely, especially with the mist. You're not supposed to take pictures but-ahem! I did. Then after that we met up with Dad for some lunch and headed to ANOTHER little town called Eze. We climbed up to another old castle and explored. The mist was so thick- well, I guess it was more fog than mist- that you couldn't see the houses below. There was another cemetay there, so that made it kind of creepy and eerie and cool. Now we're back in the flat, getting ready to go to Paris tomorrow!
*pretend this is a separate post*
I'm updating this about a year later because I forgot to write about Paris! Quelle dommage. I think. Or something.
Anyway, Paris was lovely. Let's see if I can remember the cool bits.
Our first night we met up with our lovely friends the Martins, who were staying in Paris at the same time as us. Our hotel was a Best Western, I think, and it was on the outskirts of Paris in a run down industrial area. We refer to it affectionately as "the Hotel Baghdad" because it looked like it belonged in a war zone. Tres sketchy. Anyway, that night we took a bus to the train station, then the train into the center of Paris...or so we thought. The train stopped about a mile from where we wanted to be. And when I say stopped, I don't mean paused. I mean stopped. Like, "hey, we're kind of tired of driving this train so I think we'll just stop in the middle of somewhere and see where the Americans end up because LOL they don't know where they are!".
No matter. We got off and walked. Keep in mind this is early April in Paris, so it was a tiny bit chilly.
Oh we saw beautiful things. The Eiffel Tower was all lit up, and they did a fantastic light show when it got dark. We also saw the Arche de Triomph (not sure if I spelled that right) which was also lit up and gorgeous.
By the time we got round to dinner, it was going on ten o'clock. And it was freezing. None of us had come prepared, since we had been in Nice the week before, where it was positively pleasant, maybe in the 60s during the day. Paris was so cold, and I had gotten sick back in Nice, so I was feeling rotten and miserable.
We left the restaurant round 11, and had to walk back to the train station. We had to go maybe six-eight stops. When we got off, we realized we'd gone too far. So back on the train we go. Well, once we get to the correct stop, we realize that the bus that we had taken before had stopped running for the night. By this time it was a little after midnight. I'm sick as a dog and all of us are on the verge of freaking out.
Suddenly a police car pulls up. Dad goes over and talks to them in French, learning useful information such as "your hotel is like a few kilometers down that road, I think," or "you can probably hitch a ride with someone driving by."
The short and short of it is that eventually, with the help of a very nice man, we flagged down a white van. It was one of the vans with no seats in the back that's used for catering or transporting band equipment. Dad rode in the front with the driver while the rest of us found perches on boxes or sat on the floor in the back. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the Sketchy White Van story.
The rest of Paris was absolutely lovely. Along with our friends, we went to the catacombs, which was fantastic. Lurking under the streets of Paris are skulls and femur bones stacked on top of each other like honeycombs, morbid and completely fascinating. We also went to one of the oldest restaurants in Paris, La Montparnasse. Absolutely incredible food- very expensive but so delicious.
The next day, we went to the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa and other famous, incredible works of art. We also traveled to Montmartre, the artist's quarter and home of the famous Moulin Rouge. I am a huge fan of the movie, so this was an unbelievable experience for me. We saw the artists in the square, and the Sacre Coeur, the basilica at the top of the hill. It was huge and had some amazing stained glass windows as well as some lovely carved wood on the inside. There in Montmartre, we parted ways with our friends who were traveling to Germany.
The next couple of days we spent wandering around Paris- the architecture and the street scenery was beyond description. We visited the Eiffel Tower again, thought about getting into line to climb it, then decided against it (it was about a five hour wait). There was also a cool church that we investigated- the Saint Sulpice Les Champs, which is mentioned in the book The Da Vinci Code. The church in the movie was not the same as the real Saint Sulpice, but it was really interesting all the same.
We also attended Easter Mass in Notre Dame. I am not a religious person, but that was an amazing experience. The mass was in French, of course, but we were able to understand the gist of it. The stained glass windows were so beautiful- red and green and blue, and the sun shone through them and hit the floor in such a way that the floor itself looked like a painting.
From there we went to the Musee d'Orsay, another art museum. It's on the banks of the Seine river, and from the top floor of the museum, you can look out on the river through a gigantic clock. As with any art museum, there were paintings and photographs and sculptures. The best part for me was the Van Gogh hall (he's one of my favourite artists).
While in Paris, the weather was grey and rainy, which only seemed to make it more beautiful. Walking along the Seine in the rain, seeing the Bridge of Locks or the street artists, the gold leaf and the ornate churches, it was all magnified by the rain. It was everything a trip to Paris should be, complete with croissants, scarves and berets and striped shirts, men on bicycles with baguettes in the basket, pigeons and a guy roasting snails in a pan on the sidewalk. There was even an accordion player on one of the bridges, so of course I got my picture taken with him. Ah, Paris! What a delight it was, and shall always be.
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