The Arrivals
It was brought to my attention that the last 5 or so posts on the blog were not made by me, and so I'm setting out to correct that omission by relying on quality, rather than quantity. Kind of. :) Here are the chronicles of our time in France, starting from when I got there.
After a ridiculously long flight experience (who knew Europe was so far away? I sure didn't) I landed in Nice to find Joey very comfortably navigating French streets, shops and transportation systems, for someone who doesn't actually speak French. I was surprised at first by the city, at least in part because I didn't know anything about it before I landed. Interesting facts: Nice is France's fifth largest city and has its second largest (remarkably smoothly-run) airport. There is a large Italian/latin influence along that cost, the Côte d’Azur, because, well it's close to Italy. The climate is similar to Santa Barbara's (they're both 'mediterranean'), but Nice gets more rain so things are greener and there's more moisture. Lots of famous impressionist and other painters/artists spent time in the Côte d’Azur because they found such 'inspiration' there. Apparently artists are more inspired by pretty places. Smart artists. Nice itself reminded me a little bit of a city like Miami, in that it's a large metropolitan area that's grown in tandem with a lively tourist trade, and that is reflected in the city itself. Along the shore, for instance, you can visit the Promenade des Anglais - the English Promenade, or the Quai des Etats-Unis - the U.S. Quai. There's even a Miami Beach. Funny. Here's a photo of a typical Niçois street. Lots of bright colors on the buildings, with shuttered windows and little balconies that people would spend time on, just watching others go by on the street below. Also, as in the U.K., tiny streets with tiny cars. A new twist for us was that cars would doublepark often in Nice, sometimes overnight (!) and it appeared to be part of the normal order of things.
After a ridiculously long flight experience (who knew Europe was so far away? I sure didn't) I landed in Nice to find Joey very comfortably navigating French streets, shops and transportation systems, for someone who doesn't actually speak French. I was surprised at first by the city, at least in part because I didn't know anything about it before I landed. Interesting facts: Nice is France's fifth largest city and has its second largest (remarkably smoothly-run) airport. There is a large Italian/latin influence along that cost, the Côte d’Azur, because, well it's close to Italy. The climate is similar to Santa Barbara's (they're both 'mediterranean'), but Nice gets more rain so things are greener and there's more moisture. Lots of famous impressionist and other painters/artists spent time in the Côte d’Azur because they found such 'inspiration' there. Apparently artists are more inspired by pretty places. Smart artists. Nice itself reminded me a little bit of a city like Miami, in that it's a large metropolitan area that's grown in tandem with a lively tourist trade, and that is reflected in the city itself. Along the shore, for instance, you can visit the Promenade des Anglais - the English Promenade, or the Quai des Etats-Unis - the U.S. Quai. There's even a Miami Beach. Funny. Here's a photo of a typical Niçois street. Lots of bright colors on the buildings, with shuttered windows and little balconies that people would spend time on, just watching others go by on the street below. Also, as in the U.K., tiny streets with tiny cars. A new twist for us was that cars would doublepark often in Nice, sometimes overnight (!) and it appeared to be part of the normal order of things.
The main areas of Nice are along a wide bay that ends at a little promontory on the Eastern side. On the other side of that promontory is the Port Infernet. We loved the name. Here's a photo Joey took of some smaller boats in the port. There were all kinds of vessels there ranging from these to ridiculously large luxury yachts and cruise ships.
A day after I arrived and got adjusted to the new timezone, we left Nice for Turin, Italy. There's a story here. Joey works with a number of people in his lab at UCSB, including several visitors from Italy. One of his colleagues, Paolo, is from Turin and suggested we visit when we were in Europe. It's fairly close to Nice - just a few hours on a train which goes over the Alps past gorgeous scenery - and we'd never been to Italy before. Also, for the visa-reliant among us travel documents are such a hassle to get it makes more sense to use them to full advantage. I'd tell you about the Schengen visa experience (that's the visa I have to get to visit the EU), but it would require a whole 'nother post, and, well, I'm still working on this one. Anyway, we went off to Turin for a weekend. It was great. And it will be blogged about eventually. For the purposes of this post, however, the real adventure came when we tried to get back to Nice.
Train travel is never uneventful. You'd think we'd have learned that by now, especially after the Yorkshire experience. Our itinerary had us leaving Turin in the early afternoon, connecting in a beautifully sited town on the France-Italy border called Cuneo, and arriving in Nice in the evening. Life being what it is, our Trenitalia train from Turin to Cuneo arrived at the station 10 minutes after our connecting train left, so we resigned ourselves to the next best option for getting back to Nice: an additional connection in Ventimiglia (also on the border between France and Italy - the train route crosses it several times) and a later arrival. We got to Ventimiglia excited to be just a few stops away from a warm bed, and ran to the platform listed for our train. Straightforward, yes? We checked the signs: 'Nice, 7.20', and jumped on the waiting train about 5 minutes before it was scheduled to leave. And then it took off. Immediately. In the wrong direction. Mass panic broke out, at least between the two of us. With my limited Italian, I asked a train employee if the train was headed to Nice. I was holding out hope - sometimes they turn around, or take unlikely routes. 'No', he said, 'this train is going to Milano'. Oh God. So here we are, at the next stop the train made, the stunning Italian riviera town of Bordighieri.
Sadly, we had a hard time appreciating the beauty of the coast just there, mostly because I was ranting about Trenitalia's general incompetence for allowing signs on a train platform to read something other than the information of the train in the platform, and because we were so sad to have to re-tool our route yet again. Nonetheless, we finally made it back to Nice, where we were met by Georges, one of the owners of the adorable bed-and-breakfast we stayed in for the rest of the trip. We liked Georges and his wife Christiane from the very beginning, in part because the first stop we made after the train station, while not the bed-and-breakfast itself, was their local grocery store where there was a wine tasting underway. Not exactly a warm bed, but if there's one thing that could entice us away from a warm bed after a day of being lost on European train routes, it's a wine tasting in France. Here I am, tired but placated. Georges and Christiane are behind me. And yes, the wine was fantastic.
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