out and about: Day 6: Nice

The view from the hilltop.

Sorry if my blog posts have been a bit slack the last few days. We have been spending a lot of our energy travelling and less on blogging, etc. But we have now arrived in the south of france--la cote d'azur! The whole of our day (aside from train travel) was spent exploring the narrow streets of old Nice. I can hardly call them streets since they're more of side alleys or pathways. The buildings in the surrounding area (especially just outside of old Nice) are magnificent. Buildings can be found in every single shade of pastel--peach, salmon, pink, orange, yellow, or perhaps a little green. And most of the buildings are also in great shape with very few in apparent need of repair. If the windows in place didn't make the building symmetrical, then the rest were painted on. And every building seems to have the same terracotta roofs. These buildings combined with the palm trees and checkered marble squares made every other street corner feel like a Hollywood movie set.

The first hour in Nice was spent sitting by the beach until we left to climb Parc du Chateau hill for a good view of the city. At the top we found a small waterfall which lights up at night. We also did a little shopping (since a lot of things here are pretty cheap!) and from there basically just walked around all day. The water was too cold for swimming but the weather in France in general has been amazing! We haven't seen a cloud since London and the temperature has been floating around 68 F. For dinner we had some delicious roasted chicken with an even better salad. Nice seems like a great resort town which is a nice change from the touristy feel of Paris (not to say that Paris wasn't great of course!). Looking forward to Monaco tomorrow!

The train ride to Nice was great! It went through a lot of beautiful towns such as this one including Aix-en-Provence before taking us along the Mediterranean. We didn't actually arrive in Nice until 1:30pm.