Night trains are getting old. I've been averaging one every three nights since I left Seville. The problem is, when I'm faced with sacrificing either 8 hours of a day in Europe, or giving up a decent night's sleep, it's my sleep that loses out, every time. There is just too much to see and do. And the Cote d'Azur is no exception.
After arriving in Nice this morning and settling at the cozy Villa St. Exupery (best hostel in the Cote d'Azur, even serving breakfast to us early-arrivals who descended before checkin this morning), I was off for the Matisse Museum, since today (being the first Sunday of the month), all museums are free.Nice is apparently the best museum magnet in all of France, outside of Paris. Mattisse, as it turns out, is not one of my favorite artists, and I was glad after wandering through the galleries that I hadn't paid for my entrance. I can appreciate all art to some degree, but aside from the fact that he switched careers in his early twenties, from practicing law to taking up sculpting and painting, I wasn't overly impressed.
The saddest thing about extended travel through Europe is that after a while, even the most impressive of cathedrals and museums becomes humdrum. But I think that's not the issue with this one. Mostly, his art just doesn't resonate with me. And that's a personal opinion, but since art is so subjective, I'm entitled to it :)
It just so happened that today was also the start of a big festival in Nice, celebrating its roots and traditional culture. The park adjacent to the museum was the picture of a small-town state fair, with homespun goodies, carnival rides, and families spread on picnic blankets enjoying a day out with friends and neighbors.I bought a sandwich from one of the shops and bit into a huge round of flour-dusted dense bread filled with olives, radishes, boiled eggs, and bits of other vegetables. It was quite delicious, as the flour caking my mouth afterward must have evidenced.
I was lucky enough to catch a traditional dance performance by a troupe of perhaps 12-14 young Niceans. They were dressed in period costumes, and pranced on stage to the tune of a small band, made up of a two accordions, a saxophone, and another instrument I didn't recognize. The spirit was jovial, and my favorite dance was a smile-inducing story of the townswomen whose laundry day was interrupted by a bunch of foolhardy men from the village. The lighthearted banter that ensued eventually ended with the men tied up in a knot with a rope made of clothing from the women's laundry baskets.
I met a lanky, overly talkative Frenchman named Alain, whose original ploy that he spoke a "little" English was quickly discovered to be a slight overexaggeration. He rode me on his moped all over the city, to the famous Promenade de Anglais which stretches for seven kilometers along Nice's gray-pebble beach, to the famous chateau set up in the hillside, which overlooks the rolling hills and expanse of the city of Nice (which is much bigger than I had realized), the busy port, and the sea beyond.We wandered through the Vieux Ville (old city), where a troupe of French performers entertained a bulging crowd with their African drumbeats and dancing. We walked through narrow streets lined with tourists shops and stared in the windows of one bakery selling some kind of local specialty I couldn't quite interpret through Alain's motor-mouth French.
Alain treated me to a typical Provence dinner at a seafood restaurant in Vieux Ville, run by family friends. At 10:00 PM, the place was buzzing with crowded tables and waiters rushing from kitchen to the checkered-cloth cafe tables lining the square.We feasted on fried calamari with a delicious cream sauce (similar to tartar sauce), raw oysters (oh! so salty! - supposedly you traditionally slurp up the oyster, then follow it with a bite of buttered bread to balance the flavor), and then a plate of chicken in some kind of buttery sauce with mushrooms and fried potatoes. Dessert was "French cream with caramel sauce," which tasted suspiciously like the flan I had sampled a few times in Spain. At half past midnight, I crawled into bed, stomach stuffed solid and ready to slip into a peaceful night's sleep.
~Melanie
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