friday, we got on a train for nice around noon. we connected again in lyon, but unfortunately on the train from lyon to nice i was in a different train car than the rest of the group. that happened to be on a different train (it was split in two, so mine just followed theirs). it was a long trip, but the night was still young when we got to nice so we stopped by our hotel, the hotel de kent, then went straight to the beach. our hotel rooms had really nice, new tv sets in each room but only had three channels. and one of them was just an hour-long news reel on repeat. after the beach, we walked down the promenade des anglais, which runs along the beach, and stumbled upon this really impressive war monument:
those are people on the bottom right. it was huge. and the main part of it was covered with names of people that were killed, i think mostly in the two world wars. we wandered around some more, and stopped at a kebab place (comme toujours) for dinner. these kebabs were different from any that i've seen--it was like a tortilla wrapped around the meat. it was good though. on the way back to the hotel, we saw a little group of street performers, two jugglers and a guy playing guitar. the guitar player was playing a riff then looping it and playing more over it. it was pretty cool until he just stopped playing and started dancing. that was kinda bizarre.the next morning, we got up and walked out to the russian orthodox church of nice that was built by tsar nicholas. apparently nice was a favorite vacation spot for russian aristocrats, so this is the biggest russian orthodox cathedral outside of the motherland. it was weird to see the eastern architecture juxtaposed with palm trees.
it was extremely hot, so that was enough walking for us. beach time.
we found a decent spot and collapsed for a couple hours. as one might expect, there were lots of nude sunbathers. unfortunately for us, most of the ones around us were extremely large women. it was best to just close our eyes and get some sleep. one problem with nice beaches, im not sure if it applies to the rest of the cote d'azur, but there is no sand. it's more like rounded pebbles and full-sized rocks:
we originally had made the mistake, when trying to decide on which city to visit, of typing "Nice beaches" into the google images search. so naturally, every picture that came up was a really NICE beach. but they weren't in nice, france. we felt slightly deceived, but i guess we should have known better. that stuff was clearly not as comfortable as napping on some warm sand, but we made do. the water felt great, and as the weather report had predicted there was abundant sunshine. will called over a sunglasses vendor and managed to haggle some probably fake sunglasses down from 25 euros to 5 euros. i was impressed. i attempted to apply sunblock, but i apparently didn't do a very good job. i'm still pretty sunburned.
after many hours of relaxation, we walked down the beach a ways until we got to this mountain/hill along the beach. there were stairs going all the way up, so we scaled it and got a pretty great view of the city, definitely postcard-worthy:
there was also this big waterfall coming down from the top of the mountain. the water splashing off of it was quite refreshing. at the top, there's some sort of classy chateau where people have weddings, so ashley had to stop and take creeper pictures of a wedding party.after we came down, it was about time for dinner. we had decided we'd try seafood while on the sea, so we found a not-too-expensive but still respectable looking restauraunt. they had a section called fish and chips, which i assumed mean that the different fish listed below would be fried and served with french fries. three of us ended up ordering the fresh sea bass and chips, and we were not prepared for what came out:
i've never been faced with a meal that still has eyes and scales before, so i was definitely weirded out at first. but i managed to ignore that and it turned out to be pretty delicious. i think i probably would have preferred the meat sans head and tail and bones. we wandered around the city some more after dinner, had some gelato (we were as close to italy as i'm going to get on this trip, so it was both necessary and delicious). we were entertained by more street performers, this time a step it up-style dance crew.
the next morning, i had to catch my first train back at 9:30. once again, i was on a different train than the others because i'm using a eurail pass, which means often the cheapest trains for the others are not free for me. for some reason i thought i had a 3 hour layover in marseilles between trains, so i had actually planned out a couple things i wanted to see in the city. unfortunately, once i got there i realized that i only had an hour and a half. the main thing i wanted to see was the notre dame de la garde, a huge cathedral on a hill overlooking the city. you can see it here from the train station:
abandoning my public transport plans, i decided to just try my best to walk there with the time i had. but things on hills look a lot closer than they really are. i got about halfway, speedwalking and running up and down the hills of the city, then had to turn back. i'm not exactly sure why, but most of the parts of the city that i walked through smelled awful. like dog crap smell completely permeating your nose. that was pretty unbearable. luckily i did manage to see a couple cool things during my somewhat unsuccessful visit of marseilles.
now, im back in vichy trying to figure out next weekend. it was supposed to be a trip to bordeaux by car with my friend alex from clermont ferrand, but something came up for him so now we're trying to figure out if we can take a train. tomorrow, the school is doing a trip to clermont to scale the puy-de-dome, that big volcano that i saw when i was there. i'm going to go if i can figure out where to sign up.
i'm going to try to make it a habit to end each post with the funniest picture of the day. for this trip--have you ever wondered what it looks like when those street performers that paint themselves gold and pretend to be statues are on break?
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