The French Riviera is exactly as beautiful and romantic as you would imagine or as you've been told by anyone who's ever been there. I'll spare any more flowery language and get down to business. In addition, any puns involving the word "nice" from this point on are still both intentional and obnoxious.
The hostel that we chose, Villa St. Exupery, is the nicest hostel in Europe. Nice rooms, nice showers, free towels, and one euro beer and cookies in the bar / common room. If you're ever going to Nice and want a nice place to stay, stay there.
To be perfectly honest, we didn't do a whole lot on the first day. After blitzing through all of the main tourist attractions in the two former capitals of the Roman Empire, we kind of just felt like taking it easy for a day. So we went to the (pebble) beach with our new Australian friend Prema and just sat around until lunch, at which point we bought some bread, cheese, olives, and apples from an outdoor market, and then took it all back to the beach and ate it.
Dipping my feet in the Mediterranean
In the afternoon we walked around for a while and decided to stop for coffee at the top of a hill overlooking the ocean. We were joined by Sheng, Michele, and Colleen, three Americans (well, Sheng is technically Chinese) who are studying in Salzburg. So our new multi-ethnic group walked around for a bit more, went out to dinner at a Nice restaurant in the old city, grabbed a box of wine from a local supermarket, drank half of it on the beach, headed back to the hostel, and polished off the rest of it. Again, not exciting to talk about, but definitely one of the best days of the entire trip.
The group minus Prema, who was taking the picture, and of whom I somehow don't have any good pictures
The following morning I woke up feeling like P. Diddy and was more than ready for our day trip to Monaco. On the bus to Monaco we met a Minnesotan named Joel who is studying in Tours, so we absorbed him into our group 1. because he's cool and 2. because he can speak French. We had an hour layover in a little medieval village called Eze, where we at another Mediterranean-style lunch on the terrace atop a cactus garden that had 400 different varieties of cactus. How about that for diversity?
Monaco is, overall, simply a place for the incredibly rich to engage in obscene displays of individual wealth. We visited the prince's car collection, which cost us 3 euro to see, as I recall. It wasn't even a museum, it was just a bunch of the prince's cars sitting in a showroom. I learned an important lesson from this: if you're rich enough and lazy enough, you can make an offensive amount of money by simply charging people to stare at your expensive things.
After the car museum, we walked around the harbor for a while and stared at yachts. Again, just a ridiculous display of wealth. We were probably staring at upwards of $50 billion at certain points. It was a beautiful thing.
At nightfall we headed to the old casino. We briefly thought about going in the game room, but it would have cost 10 euro and we would have had to have had* our passports with us as well, so instead of gambling we had a 45-minute conversation with one of the greeters outside of the game room. His name was Jean-Pierre and he had a few choice words about George W. Bush and about how much better things are in Monaco/Europe, but he liked us because we were multi-lingual and relatively well-cultured. So while we failed to live up to the American stereotype, he hit the French stereotype dead on.
Outside of the casino
That's one Rolls-Royce, a Mercedes, two Porsches, a BMW, and an Audi. Not bad, really.
Here's where the story gets epic: our hostel guide told us that trains would run back to Nice until midnight. Well, the French were on strike that day (SURPRISE!!!!!), and the last bus was at 7 PM, so we were essentially completely stranded. We had two choices: take a cab that would cost about 100 euro, or walk four and a half hours back to Nice through winding mountain roads at night. We decided to walk. As we walked, we stuck our thumbs out in a halfhearted attempt to hitchhike. Frenchman after Frenchman would pass and laugh. The situation seemed hopeless. I mean, there were four of us. Who would stop and pick up four hitchhikers?
About 45 minutes into our journey, and just as we had finally exited the Monaco city/country limits, a giant black VW van passed us and then stopped. The driver leaned out and asked, in English, "Where are you going?", to which we responded, "Nice!" He said, "I take you closer." So, we decided to chance it and hop in this stranger's giant van.
This is pretty much the exact vehicle
At first we were pretty nervous about the whole situation, but as we opened the door we saw a baby seat in the back of the van, which assuaged our fears considerably because this guy was clearly a family man. Either that or he was incredibly good at kidnapping. We got in and introduced ourselves and eventually learned that our savior, Gabor Bretz, is actually a famous Hungarian opera singer who had just gotten out of rehearsal for a production of La Bohèmien at Casino Monte Carlo. He drove us almost all of the way back to Nice. He also offered to show us around Budapest when we take out class trip to Hungary in May.
An interview with Gabor:
http://kultura.hu/main.php?
Gabor playing the part of Don Giovanni in Don Giovanni:
So, sketchy decision #2 of spring break also turned out to be a resounding success. Take that, French train strike. Our incredible luck given the situation is evidence of divine intervention if I've ever seen it. Life really couldn't have been any better.
* this is one of my favorite English grammatical constructions. Note that six different words are required to form the verb.
0 comments:
Post a Comment