Nice is a lovely little town. It's actually not that little, it's the fifth largest city in France...but I always thought it was little and will therefore continue to refer to it as a little town. We arrived at 4am from Barcelona...not the comfiest bus trip I've ever had! It was freezing, the bus station was closed and we had no idea where we were. Luckily, when I called the hostel to ask them to call us a cab, the receptionist said he'd come and pick us up. Shen was his name and he was a babe. Probably the biggest babe I've met on this trip...more babin' than Berlin Adam and Roman Alex put together. He was British and when I saw him the next day wearing glasses and a coat I nearly died. Enough of that though...
Nice is great. It has a lovely fruit and flower market, beautiful blue water (shame about the giant rock pile that they call a beach), lovely buildings and really friendly people. They also have a soccer team...whose fans like to riot and shoot flares at the riot police...nearly getting caught in the middle of a soccer riot was one of the scarier moments I've had on this trip! But a good story to tell later.
Nice is also a mere forty minutes from Monaco. Timo, Bron and I spent a lovely day there. We went to the casino...well....we stood outside the casino and looked at the really expensive cars...We also went to the palace which was cool and went the whole day without food because Monaco is stupid expensive! Great day though.
After Nice we went to Marseille...it seemed like a good idea at the time...I mean, Marseille - it sounds cool, right? Wrong. Really, really wrong. Here's why...
Giant mounds of festering rubbish on every street. Disgusting! The garbage men had been on strike for 5 days when we got there. I read on the BBC site that there were 8,000 tonnes of rubbish in the streets by the time the army got called in to start moving it away! We saw the trucks...and that was probably the coolest thing I saw in Marseille. I aslo read that some locals got so annoyed about having giant piles of rubbish outside their houses that they set the piles on fire...I'm not sure how this would have helped though...French people are crazy!
We also saw a couple of protests in both Nice and Marseille. However, the ones we saw weren't quite as hectic as this one...
| This looks more like the soccer riot we nearly got caught in in Nice (well...maybe not quite) |
We were going to go to Bordeaux, but we'd really had enough of trying to get around during a national strike, so we came to Paris instead. Paris is 'the shit' as the cool kids say. It feels so different to last time I was here. I think because it was one of our first stops it felt really intimidating, now it just feels rad. Yesterday Timo and I walked about 16km...I dont think I've ever walked that much in a day! We went to Notre Dame and The Eiffel Tower at night when they were lit up - gorgeous!
Well that's all for now! I'll put up photos next time!
Love to you all,
Courtney <3
No comments:
Post a Comment