A day in Nice
I was in Nice from the night of Sept. 25 to the night of Oct. 2, and mostly I walked around, gawking at buildings that were old and pretty, as well as the ones that were newer but also pretty. Most of them seemed to have shutters on the windows, and many have elaborate decorations carved in stone. You just don't see that on, for example, a medical office building in Los Angeles.
The most fascinating section of town I visited was Old Nice, where the buildings are so close together cars can't get through. There are lots of pubs, people checking out the old, narrow buildings, little squares with café tables, little shops on the ground floor of buildings with apartments above. On like my third day in town, a girl named Sarah and I -- two of the first people from our English-language-assistant program to arrive at the hostel in Nice -- went down there to eat lunch, walk around, and maybe use the Internet or something.
Sarah's really nice, blond, about 5-4, well-spoken. She isn't very boisterous, but she's down for a good time -- always smiling, and we hatched a plot to dress up in our finest and go to the casino with whomever else wanted to go. (We tried it soon after, but it fell through when we missed the bus into town and some people didn't want to walk or wait for the night bus.)
We found this little pizza café where she had some kind of savory tart and I had a slice of cheese pizza, plus we split the big carafe of red wine, for like 11 Euros, or about $16. Here, that's a huge deal. We sat at a long table in the mild sun, talking about life in St. Louis (her hometown) and Los Angeles (mine), about what we expected out of the year, about what we thought of France so far -- I'm sure that's what we discussed, though I don't remember much of it. I do remember her trying to get a photo of a French guy in his shuttered window, which probably had a flowerbox outside, talking on the phone; he saw her, waved, and spoiled the picture, and she got all embarrassed.
We continued through Vieux Nice and went to the beach, where we sat on a railing above the rocks (Nice has a rocky beach, not a sandy one). We watched what must have been a professional (meaning for-hire, not necessarily well-trained) masseuse give a guy a backrub, complete with lots of oil and a trip down to the upper butt. It did look rather relaxing -- the guy looked like absolute Jell-O by the time the woman had finished with him. We watched people on the beach, watched the tiny waves, probably watched a windsurfer or two way out on the sea, and then turned around and went back to the city center.
The Place Massena is just this huge square with neat-looking buildings surrounding; they're done in some old style but I think the square was redeveloped sometime recently. Nearby, there is an Internet café. There, I had my first experience with exorbitant Internet rates and with French keyboards, on which the letters are arranged all differently and I always have to back up and hunt-and-peck my way through an e-mail. Let us speak no more of the French keyboard. Sarah went off to do something else, and I typed e-mail for a half-hour.
We met back up, Sarah went back to the hostel in the hills (gorgeous view although it was rather cold at night and a bit far away), and I stayed around the Place to get more things done, see more people I had recently met, and be a bum for a little while longer.
With the details changed -- different people to wander and chat with, supermarket bread-and-fruit lunch rather than pizza from a café, different little errands to run -- that's how I spent most of my first week in France.
The most fascinating section of town I visited was Old Nice, where the buildings are so close together cars can't get through. There are lots of pubs, people checking out the old, narrow buildings, little squares with café tables, little shops on the ground floor of buildings with apartments above. On like my third day in town, a girl named Sarah and I -- two of the first people from our English-language-assistant program to arrive at the hostel in Nice -- went down there to eat lunch, walk around, and maybe use the Internet or something.
Sarah's really nice, blond, about 5-4, well-spoken. She isn't very boisterous, but she's down for a good time -- always smiling, and we hatched a plot to dress up in our finest and go to the casino with whomever else wanted to go. (We tried it soon after, but it fell through when we missed the bus into town and some people didn't want to walk or wait for the night bus.)
We found this little pizza café where she had some kind of savory tart and I had a slice of cheese pizza, plus we split the big carafe of red wine, for like 11 Euros, or about $16. Here, that's a huge deal. We sat at a long table in the mild sun, talking about life in St. Louis (her hometown) and Los Angeles (mine), about what we expected out of the year, about what we thought of France so far -- I'm sure that's what we discussed, though I don't remember much of it. I do remember her trying to get a photo of a French guy in his shuttered window, which probably had a flowerbox outside, talking on the phone; he saw her, waved, and spoiled the picture, and she got all embarrassed.
We continued through Vieux Nice and went to the beach, where we sat on a railing above the rocks (Nice has a rocky beach, not a sandy one). We watched what must have been a professional (meaning for-hire, not necessarily well-trained) masseuse give a guy a backrub, complete with lots of oil and a trip down to the upper butt. It did look rather relaxing -- the guy looked like absolute Jell-O by the time the woman had finished with him. We watched people on the beach, watched the tiny waves, probably watched a windsurfer or two way out on the sea, and then turned around and went back to the city center.
The Place Massena is just this huge square with neat-looking buildings surrounding; they're done in some old style but I think the square was redeveloped sometime recently. Nearby, there is an Internet café. There, I had my first experience with exorbitant Internet rates and with French keyboards, on which the letters are arranged all differently and I always have to back up and hunt-and-peck my way through an e-mail. Let us speak no more of the French keyboard. Sarah went off to do something else, and I typed e-mail for a half-hour.
We met back up, Sarah went back to the hostel in the hills (gorgeous view although it was rather cold at night and a bit far away), and I stayed around the Place to get more things done, see more people I had recently met, and be a bum for a little while longer.
With the details changed -- different people to wander and chat with, supermarket bread-and-fruit lunch rather than pizza from a café, different little errands to run -- that's how I spent most of my first week in France.