Having a Nice time on the Cote d'Azur

June 3-5

On Sunday most of the stragglers still in JLP met with Charley, which took awhile because he went to town on Mandy’s paper. Eventually Tolu, Kaison, and I decided to go into Antibes. Kaison said he knew the way because he had been out to dinner with Allison and a few of the others the night before, but we got lost on the narrow streets near the JLP train station and had to ask a little kid riding a bike where Boulevard President Wilson was. I gathered that it ran past the lycee, so we wandered until we hit a major road that had a high school and started walking down a street as steep as the road into Sin City and/or Lumpkin Street. There were a lot of pharmacies (as usual) as well as Asian fast-food restaurants and locksmiths (Kaison said this last species probably sprang up due to the number of car break-ins—he had already seen two on his trips to town).

Eventually we got to the middle of the city, where I had a deliciously sickening beignet a crème and Tolu got a nutella banana crepe (good, but not the same level of crunchy excellence that is the nutella banini). We wandered through the old part of the town (the only pretty part), found the hidden archaeological museum on the coast, looked at porno art at the open-air market, found but could not eat “Mexican nachos” (the kitchen was closed?!), and toodled back home past a lot of other good-looking food before I grazed in my room.

I was planning on going to Beaulieu-sur-mer on Monday to look at a Greek mansion and another mansion full of statues on the coastal mountains, but the train I wanted to take was cancelled. So, I improvised and took myself to Nice with Samantha’s directions and had a great time just doing me. I looked in a few shops I had missed with the big group (the McDonalds closer to the beach was too cool! It had stonework on the inside!) and made my way to the beach over the heavily under-construction Place Massena. The beach was in its natural form—covered in little rocks, with no sand—but it was about as crowded as the beaches in Antibes since it was a nice day.

I spotted the “white thing” Samantha had told me about pretty quickly and made a beeline for it, power-walking behind a cute British guy. There was an “ascenseur” to take you to the top of the rock, but I wanted to be a badass and climb to the top. Bad/good idea. My legs ached after the first two sets of stairs, where I took my first pictures of the town below. But I made my way up all of the strange rock face with trees growing from it to find the ruins of a chapel, a graveyard, a waterfall, and two restaurants/souvenir stands. Different sides of the rock showed every bit of Nice, from the Bay of Angels that I was first walking along to the inland hills to the other bay, where the Corsican ferry could have taken me to San Remo (! it keeps taunting me!). I would have liked to have had someone to talk with about the beautiful view, but I enjoyed having some time to myself to just think, go where I wanted to go, and start scheming about getting my family there for a vacation.

I walked through all of the old city, looking in most of the weird chocolate shops and olive oil shops (they had a L’Olivier shop, the actual store for the fancy brand of olive oil I got my mother for Christmas! they had little olive trees for sale and I wanted one really bad!). I found not one but TWO 96 Flavors kiosks and had fig and pear sorbets at the first one. No beer flavored ice cream for me, but it was so good anyway!

I got back in time to chat with Charley for about an hour about what drinks to make (pastis) and what grade I got on my paper (A), and then I found Tolu and Kaison for our first run of French fry frying. Dinner stretched out into a late-night Grand Marnier crepe run, and I think I’m almost as addicted to those now as I am to nutella baninis.

It was weird going back to class on Tuesday. Everyone had fun stories from going to Bordeaux, Cinque Terre, and Florence, and we talked about “bad” movies and sex scenes for most of class after Allison recounted her dark tale of camping with Paul Cox in his unrefurbished French mansion. After class I got a blue Schweppes with Andy and Chris at Juan les Bread and rushed off in the rain to Cannes on what I thought was a trip to get something at Galleries Lafayette for my mother. Didn’t happen (my gift was out of stock!), and neither did a salad at FNAC since they had weird ones like Tandoori chicken and Salmon that day. For once I felt underdressed in Cannes, sticking out like a sore thumb on the Rue d’Antibes in my cheap pink flip flops, so I took to the beach and found a nutella banini, which I ate in front of the newly redecorated Palais (World Perfumery Congress this weekend)! I also made a stop by Monoprix, where I put the last jewel in my Schweppes crown with the purchase of “Citron Lychee Cactus” Schweppes.

Lazy day back in JLP. Everyone was finishing up the last paper for Nate’s class (experiential reporting—I talked about my encounter with the French businessmen, which I’ll probably post here soon), and in our boredom Tolu and I went to get potatoes for more French fries. We deep-fried a whole bag of potatoes and inhaled them with Geoffrey (hi, Geoffrey!) and a few visitors who we lured in with the delicious scent of frying sunflower oil. The cactus Schweppes went down easy, and plans were made to mix it with vodka for Andy and Chris’s screening of Little Bruno, the favorite “bad movie” discussed in class (actually a DVD one of the actors gave to the kids who dropped by the Gray d’Albion during the festival… “It’s the best fucking gangster movie you’ll ever see. I’m in it.”).

The set-up for the world premiere of Little Bruno in room 223 was impressive. They had rolled out the red carpet (one of the blankets from the hotel linen closet), and people wore their bow-ties in the roped-off “orchestre” section. I hooked my way in with one of my patented “invitation?” signs and sat on the futons in the balcony, making only a small drink for the drinking game of “drink every time something’s so bad you laugh.” I made it to the part with the guidance counselor’s sweaty moobs, but it just got too ridiculous; Samantha and I poured out our mostly unfinished drinks back in our room and watched Wedding Crashers. Around 1 we all got a text to go do tequila shots for Allison’s birthday at a bar in JLP, but I was too tired (and broke, and unwilling to get publicly plastered) and went to sleep at the old-granny hour of 1 am.