Qui vive? France!

So here’s the low down on Nice.

I left Annecy at 2, and got Nice by about 11. Not bad for two trains and a bus ride, and some waits in between. For the most part, I amused myself with reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “reading” Harry Potter in French (more like struggling through it), and writing that last blog entry you also just “read.” I met a nice lady on the train who was going to Toulon, where she lives. We actually had a fairly decent conversation in French: mostly, she talked and I listened, but I felt really good about it because I actually understand most of what she was saying (a real French person! Not just a teacher!), and she was really interesting. She talked about going to Canada a while ago and then stopping for a few days in New York “before the catastrophe.” She was terribly surprised by how many cars there were, and she had wanted to see the Statue of Liberty but they were doing work on it at the time. We also talked about how awful graffiti is (I think some can be pretty, but the names in big block letters are just stupid), and how annoying it is that half the time, on trains, that’s all you see of a city. Mostly, we sat in silence doing our own things (she was doing French crossword puzzles, AH!) but it was really a nice conversation.

I got to the hostel very late, about 11:30pm, and pretty much just checked in, got online to tell my mom and dad that I had arrived, and then went to bed. I slept straight through the night (I was expecting to be woken by drunken hostel-girls, since I was in a room with about 15 other girls, but after I put my i-pod in, I didn’t hear a thing.

The alarm on my i-pod went off at 5:30am, just like I planned… except I didn’t hear it. I had wanted to go to the flower market very early, because they say that it’s the best time to go. I woke up when I heard lots of voices of the girls around me getting up and asked what time it was. An Australian girl answered “About half-past eight. What time did you mean to get up?”

“A little earlier,” was all I said as I rushed to get dressed and ready. I only had 5 hours left before I my train was to leave!

I got the flower market with the help of Liz, a Canadian who has been traveling around France and who saw me looking confused and stopped to help. We talked about how beautiful all the cities are here, and how surprisingly kind the drivers are to pedestrians. Once we got to the flower market, we parted ways, and I spent as little time as possible there while still feeling like I had gotten the full experience. I bought a pear and took lots of pictures

before moving on to the next place: Le Chateau.

Le Chateau is the ruin of a castle that sat on the top of a hill, which offers one of the best views of Nice and the surrounding area. After getting lost once, and then going about halfway up to find the path barred by a giant locked gate, I finally made it to the top of the hill. There wasn’t much to see of the ruin, and there were tarps and tapelines everywhere,

so it was pretty ugly: but the view. Oh, man, was that view amazing. I spent at least ten minutes just starring, taking a few pictures, and wishing I could live there or at least stay for more than I had time for.

I asked a French lady to take a picture of me, and she did!

After the Chateau, I had planned to go to the Museum/Art Gallery of Photography, but decided that since it was closer to the station than to the beach, I would go to the Russian Church first. I walked along the Promenade des Anglais, which is right along the beach the whole way, and my backpack got heavier and heavier. By the time I got to the street where I was supposed to turn to get to the Russian Church, I decided that stopping to eat lunch and spending half an hour at the beach was a much better plan for the moment, and so that’s exactly what I did. I got a decent sandwich for a ridiculous price, and some flavored water (also ridiculously priced),

and after the lunch, used the bathroom to change into my swimsuit. One thing I did forget to bring was a towel, and I literally did not think about it until I got down to the beach and set my feet down on the hottest rocks ever in the world ever. Ever.

The thing about the beach was that it wasn’t actually sand, just lots of small/medium sized, very smooth rocks. And that was fine for people who had little sturdy mats that they laid down on so they wouldn’t have to feel the rocks, but I didn’t even have a towel!  I swam in the Mediterranean Sea, picked up some cool rocks for myself and other various people, and eventually forced myself to lie down (after putting on copious amounts of sunscreen). It was very hot. Once I actually lay down for more than two seconds, though, the rocks felt wonderful on my (mostly) bare skin. It was so nice after the hours of rushing around the city with my heavy backpack, (even though I’m appreciating it now, next weekend in Paris, I will not be bringing my computer), and I stayed for half an hour, just sunbathing. Wonderful!

When I felt like I had been there for enough time, I got my things together (changed IN PUBLIC- scandalous!) and moved on to the Russian Church. I stopped in a garden along they way to take pictures of statues, (well, okay, people, really)

and get some more water from a fountain (I seriously will miss the number of fountains they have just lying around the cities with cold, potable water, here), and finally made it to the church. It was closed (well, the inside, anyway). I got there at 1:00 (two and a half hours until my train would leave), and took some pictures of the outside, which was beautiful,

but decided that I was not going to wait until 2:30 for it to open and pay three Euros to look around for ten minutes then rush to the train station. Instead, I asked another French woman to take a picture of me there, which she was very happy to do (she had clearly handled a Nikon like mine before because she took two or three pictures without needing explanation),

and I left.

I went, finally, to the photography museum. I met a lady from New York on the way who was lost and did not speak a lick of French, so I helped her get to the train station so she could take a taxi (where are all the taxis?! She kept asking), and made it to the photography museum with plenty of time to spare. I only stayed for ten minutes or so because it wasn’t that interesting, but I did listen in on a bit of a tour being given in English, and learned that one of the photographers exposéed there thinks that humanity has “lost it’s way,” and that’s how he stages all of his photos. The photos were really obviously staged though, and not that great, so I wasn’t too impressed. But I’m glad I went, because they had a case in the front of a bunch of really old cameras, which I love admiring.

After that, I took my time going back to the station, and stopped in a department store with cheap clothes to find absolutely nothing that I liked (French fashion is a little too see-through for my tastes right now), and, finally, got back on the train to come home to Annecy. And that’s where I am now.

Au Revoir, Nice!

Addendum to Nice:
After I wrote this, I was waiting in the station at Lyon Part Deux, and one REALLY weird thing I witnessed was all the pigeons walking around the station (that is inside), which people didn't really seem bothered by. Yeeg.

I got onto the last train from Lyon Part Deux to Annecy, for about 2 hours. The first part was pretty boring, but after some of the people left, I was alone in the compartment with a tall, skinny, French musician who looked like he was carrying his whole life with him, and a tall, large black man with lots of jewelry. Within a few minutes, the black man asked the musician if he could play his guitar. The musician agreed. After two minutes of strumming, another guy walked in, an average looking French student, and sat and listened.
I was very tired and the music was very soothing. One of the train employee's was hanging out in the back with us and asked if the music was bothering me. It took a while for me to understand because I was so tired and he was speaking so quickly, so that by the time we got anywhere, they just assumed I did not know any French and they all kept trying to translate his question in various ways.
"Is it bothering me? No! No, no, no, of course not."
"Ok-ay,"
and the music continued.
The average looking French student got out a recorder and started playing along. For a very long time, the musician sat and just listened. He looked very tired, and I have to assume that he had been playing all day on the streets.
Eventually, though, he got out his electric sitar.
Yeah, you read that right.
It's a sitar... but you plug it into an amp powered by batteries to get the sitar noise across. By this time, the black man had decided that the guitar was a drum, and so, on the ride home from an exhausting but wonderful day in Nice, I was transported by music to India via recorder, drum, and sitar.
Perfect way to end the day? I think so.