An Evening in Nice
Readers, Nice was nice.
I didn’t pay for a beach chair even though i wouldn’t have minded drink service because 1) i enjoy laying on the rocks and 2) it seemed wrong to charge 14 Euro for your own little space of the beach. The whole idea seems slightly more American than French…
It seems like Nice is one of those places where it doesn’t matter how many vacationers, tourists, or annoying people there are, it just spits out charm (sometimes mildly dilapidated) everywhere you go.
I don’t think even the most hardcore dieters could resist this, could you? I wasn’t dieting, thank goodness, because otherwise I could have only gotten TWO scoops instead of my daily three:
Salted Butter Caramel, Glazed Chestnut, and Jasmine. This is kind of a morbid question, but do you think that if you were on death row and requested this to be your last meal, they would somehow procure it for you?
Oh, the scent!
Dinner was a goat cheese and eggplant millefeuille that was divine. What was not divine was spilling rose all over my white blouse and silk skirt. How classy!
The evening ended here, half-watching the partial moon, half-watching the light it shone.
Introducing my fabulous, wonderful, amazing couchsurfing hosts
I heard about CS in early 2008. I joined CS on June 22, 2009. I waited an entire year before becoming comfortable enough with the idea to actually try couchsurfing. 99% of the people I talked to about doing it pooh-poohed it, with the exception of Chuck. Some of them explicitly tried to talk me out of it (citing safety reasons, offering to help pay for hotels, etc), and others just gave me this LOOK. Like, it was nice knowing you! if I don’t see you again, I’ll know why!
I’m really very thankful that I didn’t listen to these people because I had one of the best experiences of my life. I went in with no expectations, and from the very beginning, I was swept up by the kindness and trust of people with whom I had only ever talked to via the internet.
Let’s start with Sylvie.
Sylvie loves organic stuff. She’s an artist, a dancer, a musician (plays the djembe!), and works with troubled children as an educatrice spécialisée. She stops to take a look at every jewelry stand at the markets in Antibes and Nice. She is the kind of girl who, when it gets insufferably hot, takes showers with her dress on at the public beach showers. In short, she’s quite lovely.
While she is renovating her new apartment in Nice, I stayed at her little flat in Roquebrune. Her parents built it right next to their house when she was 18. I think I probably took over a hundred photos of their garden, terrace, and views. Some afternoons I didn’t even want to go anywhere, so perfectly content was i just sitting on this bench table and reading and writing and taking photos.
Of course, we still made it to the beach. A note about this beach: It was the very same one CD and I went to in 2007 on our magical beach day so you can imagine how happy I was to rediscover it.
Sylvie’s English is excellent, the kind of excellent you don’t expect from someone who hasn’t lived in an English-speaking country for a while. I love polyglots, mainly because I am very jealous of them, and it turns out that Sylvie is Italian and speaks that language too. Her father hails from northern Italy, and he kind of reminded me of Marcello Mastroianni. Her mother comes from southern Italy, and I pretty much gobbled up everything she made for lunch one afternoon. It included squash flower beignets and homemade melon sorbet.
We spent so much time together talking, eating, swimming, walking that I felt like I was visiting an old friend instead of making a new one. I knew she was my kind of person when we spent an hour grocery shopping at Carrefour (true fact: Carrefour is one of my favorite places in France). I was sad to leave her at the end of our 4 days together, but very excited to mosey on over to Menton and meet my next host, Catherine.
Right off the bat, Catherine is super chatty and laughs a lot. Plus she has great legs and is seemingly indefatigable. I wanted to hug her for tolerating my French for two days and for teaching me a new way to say something sucks, “c’est de la daube!”
Catherine lives in a spic and span apartment in the very middle of Menton. As with my previous host, I was in a superb location with her. One morning, we took a walk to the food market and brought home an amazing assortment of treats for lunch, and I loved trying each and every single one of them: Socca, anchovy pizza, pichade (a french tomato tart and a specialty of Menton, acc. to wikipedia), Swiss chard beignets, and pissaladiere (a white pizza with caramelized onions). Dessert was fresh figs.
She also let me raid the olive collection in her refrigerator.
We went to the Friday market in Ventimiglia, Italy, where I swore to buy nothing but ended up borrowing money from her to buy gloves! She is like me in that we are not the kind of person you want to go shopping with when you’re on a budget. However, they were very pretty brown leather gloves with rabbit fur lining inside. I don’t feel so guilty about rabbit fur because I eat them too. Mentally, I couldn’t handle fur from foxes, beavers, raccoons.
I am indebted to Catherine for taking me to a parapharmacie and going through each French beauty brand with me. NO JOKE, I have been wanting to do that for the last two years. I left with a Cattier toothpaste containing clay and propolis for my dad and plans to stock up on Nuxe products in Paris.
There is something about traveling that makes people sappy, and so here it goes: Sylvie and Catherine, thank you for your time and generosity. Thank you to Heidi, for treating me to tea and fabulous views of London at the Tate; and Kelly, the stranger who gave me a ride at midnight on a creepy country road outside of London; and to you, the guy in Nice who bought my train ticket because my credit card wouldn’t work in the machine and let me pay pay you back in coins.**
It’s hard to muster the courage to travel alone without a purpose and to trust that good will come of it, but I think it always does.
**But no thanks to you, the bus driver who left me on the road somewhere between Eze and Beaulieu because I only had 70 centimes instead of 1 Euro.
Water everywhere
In Menton, France.
I adore this young-man-cum-pseudo-Jesus. He says everything I want to say just by standing there. Nice, France
People were jumping off this rock into the sea! CD would have done it, I’m sure.
I’m hazy on this photo, but I think Sylvie stopped the car in Villefranche Sur Mer so I could get a better shot. I think that little peninsula is Cap Ferrat??
Sometimes infinity pools make me nervous, but it must feel wonderful to swim in them, especially when the backdrop is that.
Monaco, Monaco. That little round building near the corner is where the Norah Jones concert was. Divine!
And of me, in Ventimigilia, Italy. woohoo! Just a little ways east is France. i tried hard to apply sunscreen every few hours, but sweat mixed with the sunscreen is not a delicious combination for my skin. A couple days I kept my bathing suit in my bag and ran into the water for a quick dip before continuing on with the day.
No theme
I am safely ensconced in a cozy apartment in the 18th arrondissment after two weeks of liberating but wearying travel. My right hand is callousing from dragging my suitcase in and out of trains, buses, and metros. The only thing it wants to grab hold of is a nice cup of tea, which I have easily made happen, thanks to the thoughtfulness of the people from whom I am borrowing this flat for the weekend.
I took nearly 1000 photos so far and have yet to go through all of them carefully, but here is a small group of them, in no particular order. They are all from the south of France, however. London wasn’t so easily photogenic.
Such an inspiring thing to wake up to! Wouldn’t you want to jump out of bed and fling the windows wide wide open and shout to the world?
Villefrance Sur Mer from the train. THE TRAIN.
If it is possible to be smitten with windows, I am.
Little Provencal dresses that I want to force upon my imaginary future daughter
Abandoned repose in old Antibes. Was the shopkeeper reading or bubbling in Sudoku when he stuck his glasses in as a bookmarker?
a fancy schmany hotel precariously perched atop the hills over monaco
I love the grooves and dents of heirloom tomatoes, especially when they’re from the garden out yonder
I choose a double-masted sailboat over a yacht any day.
Roquebrune cap martin, france
It may be hard to see on first view, but this young man is upside down. I would love to send him this photo.
Nice, France.
Bougainvillea add such a nice splash of character to a building. Imagine throwing those windows open and looking left, right, down, up: all purple flowers and blue skies.
Taken in Eze Village.
The scene at dinner last night. The menu: melon with ham, a tomato and some lettuce picked from the garden, olive oil made by the grandparents of ST, my couchsurfing host, and a chunk of goat cheese. We split a bottle of wine and talked into the night. I am having what you would call a nice time away.
The Mediterranean Sea from Nietzsche’s Walk, on the way down from Eze Village to the bottom. The colors!
Complete reversal
In September 2006, I wrote:
having a layover in london makes me not look forward to france even more. honestly, i can’t understand why i feel this way. I suppose if i had mastery of french i wouldn’t dread it so much. The thought that I won’t be able to verbalize exactly what i want to say all the time makes me positively shudder.
In October 2006, I wrote:
I want to go back to Orange County or L.A. where I know everything and have a car and have people I love. I can live without the grandiose architecture and the pain au chocolats. I’ll settle for the Getty and madelaines from Trader Joes. I don’t even think it’s the language problem anymore, my French isn’t as bad as I remembered it and we have been getting along fine, especially in Troyes where practically no one speaks good English. It’s just a perpetually hovering feeling that right now is not the right time for me to be away. Is it possible to be homesick for a place I’ve only known for three days? Because I miss London badly. I miss British English and the city’s ubiquitous kindness.
Today, July 11 2010, I am feeling what is the complete reversal of my sentiments back then. Tomorrow I’ll be leaving for a london/france trip again, and it’s been a bit hard drumming up enthusiasm for the former.
It goes like this: London? Fish and chips. Tate Modern. Topshop. Visit my parents’ old apartment. South of France? OMG THE AZURE BEACHES! THE TOPLESS SUNBATHING! THE SHAMELESS LAZINESS! THE STUNNING VIEWS ON TRAIN RIDES! THE INTENSE FLAVORS! THE UNBELIEVABLE MARKETS! THE GELATO! THE SALES!
See the difference? I suspect this sentimental switch has to do with becoming intimate with one country and not the other. Living in France, where I spent some of my loneliest months, along with multiple trips back and a French partner whose parents keep sending treats in the mail kind of ties you to a place. Like, I can’t not think of CD’s and my wonderful road trip to the French Riviera 2 summers ago when I am planning for my trip back next week, even though this might be a completely different itinerary and experience.
To be fair, I do expect a lot of good times in England. I’m staying with a former roommate and will be seeing a couple old friends as well meeting some Couchsurfers. All of which sound marvelous. There is just no sense of home, which is ironic since I was born in Westminster Hospital, right smack dab in the middle of Central London.
