from Nice: the last Sunday

At some point, one has to pack up and return home.

Many would roll an eye at that, given how many days I spend on this side of the ocean. I’m beyond explaining the hows and whys of being here so often and for so long. It’s just the way it is. Though, at some point, work and resources (or lack thereof) kick in and the period of staying put in the Midwest has to be far longer than I would want it to be. Like this next season. Sigh.

But right now, I have a Sunday in Nice. The best thing that you can do with a Sunday in France is to do nothing grand, nothing stressful.

I’m good at that.

Naturally, I head for the beach. And watch young men do their usual pick up game of volley ball. The one who misses a hit gets dunked.





In the afternoon I visit several parks. The one on the Rock, with the view toward the beaches..





…and toward the water, which on a hazy afternoon blends into the sky so perfectly that it looks like a boat is suspended between the two.





…and I go to the park with the merry-go-round…





…and the one with all those different palm trees.




None of these are grand, but each and every one offers a quiet space. Children playing, yes, but even that is muted, like some distant rumble of happiness. I may miss Sundays in the parks even more than baguettes and fraises des bois and glasses of rose wine, shared with countless others.

Sigh.

So long as I am writing about tourists and visitors from other nations (see previous post), I may as well add that this city has been a favorite destination for Russians for a long time. Like, during the days of Tsars and, subsequently, after the Revolution, for those who felt they should save their necks and live outside their homeland (Russian aristocracy comes to mind).

And so it is not really surprising to come across this, one of the lovliest churches in Nice:





I went there as well, but I am put off by places that forbid cameras and so I spent more time on the outside, admiring the domes and the flowers that grow in the gardens.





In the evening, I eat a good seafood selection (with baby artichokes!) and end with a variety of strawberry treats.





A Belgian group is at the table next to mine. Here for the weekend. How nice. Nice for two days. A Sunday down south. In Europe, it is so easy to forget that travel home requires, for me, many many hours chasing planes and buses and who knows what else. To be endured, because there’s no other way.

Sigh.

I take their picture and so they insist on taking mine. I will include it here, if only because it may be the only time the flash was used on my camera. [And no, I did not betray my man Jason, the hair king back home; all my life, my hair has turned blonde in the summer - it may be the only good thing that befalls those with fine Slavic hair.]

from Nice: vignettes

the benefits of traveling alone in the south of France

When else may you spend so many hours basically staring at people?

I have spent so many weeks, nay, months alone in France that I think I am entitled to put forth some generalizations, based on hours and hours of people-watching. Yes, sure, with all the qualifications about how this is just what I see and it could be that I see a very limited orbit and have a radar with a fuzzy set of detectors. Whatever. I still want to say that:

British women (and I have seen so very many British men and women in the south of France!) are demure. At all ages. I have this feeling that it will never change. That they will project this quality for decades still, even if the prime minister back home ever is a woman. Oh, that’s right, they’ve had one of those already. Twenty-one years of her. It changed things not a bit. In the south of Frnace, British women remain demure. And they ask for things like English breakfast tea, instead of just tea.

British men see themselves as having the burden of explaining the world to the women they travel with. I don’t think they regard it as a burden, actually. The women must be learning a lot because they listen politely, even when they know and I know that what their man is saying is wrong or pigheaded or a random guess. How many breakfasts must I sit through at hotels where the man explains what should happen that day and for what reason?

Polish travelers to France assume that no one in the near vicinity understands what they are saying and so they express their insecurities openly, without attention to who may hear them. What insecurities? Polish people have always loved to travel. But they have this complex and it travels with them: we are insignificant. We are outsiders. We are marginal. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor Poles are (there are quite a number of people in Poland with soaring bank accounts, though like in other countries, they are the minority), they feel like the rules are made by others. (And so they are.)

Italians are never demure. Never. And if you asked them to speak slowly, listlessly, without emotion, particularly about such insignificant things like applying suntan lotion, they’d think you’re out of your mind. Why save passion for the bedroom?

Russians travelers have a bravado about them that comes from either too much vodka, or the fear of death, or something. When mixed with others (like Americans, for example, as at a dinner table just a few nights back), they reach for their wallet to puy rounds of even bigger, better bottles of wine. Sadly, it's all lost on the others. New wealth likes to be generous. Old wealth is blind to the whole thing.

Americans these days are all over the place. You can’t pigeonhole them anymore. Some will try to speak French, some are charmed by what they see, some complain about everything and in particular -- about service, which, in the south of France often is very very slow.



the Princess of Monaco

Today, I had the Princess of Monaco rest on the beach chair next to mine. For an hour. Then she left.

How do I know she was the Princess of Monaco? Because she had a bored, princess look upon her beautiful face (and isn’t it a prerequisite to be beautiful if you aspire to royalty in that country?) and she had with her a towel that had inscribed on it the word – Monaco. So, discreet as she may have been, I caught on fast.

The Princess, I thought, may have been under the weather, because she ordered a Perrier and sipped it listlessly as the world around her frolicked. Maybe she had frolicked too hard last night.

Her entourage (others may have guessed, wrongly, I would posit now, that these were her mom and dad and brother) did not purchase a chair to sit on. They merely hovered. She looked at them with disdain.

She did rouse herself to hail a watermelon seller. She spit the pits into her glass of unfinished Perrier and then watched them sink. That may have been the only thing that captured her imagination.

Come to think of it, maybe she wasn’t a princess from Monaco. She spoke a language that was completely unrecognizable to me, and I would have caught on to any Monacese, which, after all is just French, spoken with royal overtones. So maybe she was Hungarian or even Turkish – two languages that completely defy me.

It was an honor sharing space with one so regal. It was a relief to see her go.



the drawback of traveling alone in the south of France

Every urban beach has its spirit. I remember thinking once in Acapulco – this is soooo – Acapulco.

Nice beaches have their own spirit and soul (now that we have decided that not only humans have souls). And it has its own set of vendors. Most, perhaps all, come from Tunis. Not on the last boat, but some decades bsck, they have traveled to Nice and they have stayed.

I have watched them daily, walking the beaches, selling bottles of water, beer and coke. They carry coolers and sometimes they’ll put the cooler down, sit a while and chat to the people nearby.

Here’s the thing about traveling alone: how is it that you are supposed to apply sunscreen to your back?

One such seller of cold drinks is particularly charismatic. As he shouts out his beers and cokes, he adds: massage!

Just so you know I’m not making this up. This is him:





I watched one woman hail him over the other day. He gave a terrific massage. Shouldn’t he be equally good at applying lotion to backs?

I hailed him over. I don’t need a massage, but some lotion would be very nice.

This did not keep him from pounding and kneading my back vigorously for a good ten minutes. I have to admit it was heavenly. I quickly put aside the embarrassing image of being watched by ten million passing tourists as I gave in to his strong hands (in much the same way I we all watched him deliver this to a woman just a few days back) and enjoyed the huge application of sun screen. You need a lot of lotion to give you friction for all the kneading and pounding, I think.



water play

So why is it that I have yet to swim?

What a silly question. Only the young and restless swim. Most of us read and/or people watch. Children walk the waterline.





Lovers, well, they take their stuff just about anywhere, including in the water.





Me, I just read and people watch.



just like mom used to make

I went to dinner at a small place, one where generations of mothers and their daughters have been cooking for decades. This is it:





The post is getting long, so I wont provide detail, but I will say this about the two other tables – one occupied by an Italian family, the other by a mother-daughter pair from the States:

First, I think that if you do not like your mother, or find her to be from another planet, you should not travel with her. It’s too sad for others to watch your cold distrust of each other. Travel does not mend broken fences.

As to the Italian family – I have never, ever seen anyone take so long to decide what to eat in my entire life. I know what it’s like to be into food, but you truly had more to say about it, just on the basis of menu-reading, than would the restaurant critic for the NYT! Very cool!





And, I liked the way you snitched food from each others’ plates and then rapped your neighbor on the fist when it happened to you! That's amore!

To the current mother-daughter chef team: you’re too generous with loading up the plate. By way of example, here's the second of four courses:





I had no idea that Nicoise food can be so – filling. Oh, and I’m sorry I set you back in your supply of olive oil. Thanks for it all – you are a remarkable team. I enjoyed meeting you, though I am sorry I got a little tongue tied. I get that way with good cooks.



about Nice...

Can I offer any additional thoughts today on what the city is like?

Sure, why not.

Balconies. Everywhere, I see balconies. Most do not have flowers. The art is in the railing and in the window adornment. So, two last photos for today. Of balconies.

from Nice: footsteps

I am following in the footsteps of myself. Yesterday’s pattern repeats itself.

A beach chair in the front row, facing the water, is hard to come by after noon. And so I head out early (by Nice standards). I’m set for a day of reading by the sea.

Except I begin to get restless. A week will pass and I will have spent it looking at blue water.



Nice, but what of Nice?

And so in the afternoon, I abandon my prize chair and head for the hills.

High expectations. I was betting on the Matisse Museum. Reopened just this month after extensive renovations/additions, it should have wowed me. A gorgeous villa of Nicoise colors, amidst olive groves, high in the hills of Nice-Cimiez – it’s primed to set me spinning.





But it doesn’t do that. I mean, the villa is beautiful and peaceful and quite empty, but for the men playing boules and a girl riding a bike – how good is that!





And yet… inside, the collection is small. Moreover, I neglect to read the signs (posted everywhere) about taking and distributing photos (I read that to mean through, for example, a blog) and how this constitutes crime against humanity (I may have overstated it in the translation). I have, in sheer ignorance, taken quite okay photos, but posting them would probably net me a nice prison term, so forget it.

And don’t think the house is where Matisse once lived. Indeed not. From what I can figure out, he spent years at the Belle Epoque hotel down the road. Along with frequent visitor Queen Victoria. Okay, she preceded him by some 100 years, but still, they shared space, so to speak.





Walking down the Boulevard de Cimiez, I had a chance to admire the villas and hotels that show off Nice’s love for Belle Epoque architecture. New wealth coming in from the final union of Nice with France meant that rich people needed spaces to live in and there you have it – the Boulevard was born.

It reminds me sort of what Beverly Hills may have looked like had someone begun that project several hundred years ago and had a few skilled Savoyards and Frenchmen coming in to lend a hand.





Forgive the inadequate photos. Grand residences tend to stand behind high walls.

Amazingly, I have time for the Chagall Museum (it’s on the way). Not only do I have time for the Museum, but I have time for a late lunch at the Museum Café. It’s a day of Italian influences (I plan on eating dinner at a place where the cook is Italian) and so I order the tomato/mozzarella combination. In a garden setting. Tranquil. I regain hope.





And maybe it’s the lunch that put me in a good mood, although I don’t think so. It’s the museum itself. The Chagall exhibit is breathtakingly beautiful. They allow photos, but I took very few. I was too busy gazing.

Toward the end, I sat and watched a brief film about Chagall’s work on the mosaic he created for Chicago. I’d actually seen the film before, though not in a million years will I be able to remember where or when. I do remember being moved then – especially by the scene where he and his wife (you would have to think his adoration for the female form has something to do with his love for his wife, no?) arrive in Chicago and whisper together about what improvements need to be made to the great mosaic. She loves him, he loves her, they talk tiles. So romantic!

So I took a photo of the mosaic in the Museum, naturally. And a close up of one little goat.





Farm animals are all over Chagall’s works, maybe because life reminds him of his Russian past, amidst farm animals. Sort of like me, except my past isn’t Russian and I didn’t have that much contact with farm animals except for my summers at my grandparents’ village home, but still…


In the evening I hike to the port (it’s far). Nice views of the bay, of the setting sun, of balconies – how can one not be charmed.










I eat in a small place that does only vegetarian foods (La Zucca Magica). The cook has been called the best Italian cook in Nice, which of course says nothing, but I have hope.

It’s one of those places where you don’t know what you’re getting or what the price is until it’s all over and done with. But I was pleased. Zucchini soup, tomato stuffed with pesto pasta, a cheese tart with lemon and saffron, pasta with peppers, tiramisu. Very honest, very tasty, great on the budget.





It’s late. The moon is out over the old port…





So where is the heart of the city? Where are the neighborhoods that aren’t packed with outsiders? Here, I come across a night hangout where only French is spoken. Men drive up on moterbikes. Two girls walk by, shout a greeting, move on.




But this seems small compared with the heart of the old town, where streets are packed with indistinguishable, cheap eating places. Hundreds of them. And when you leave the old streets, you enter the new ones and again, all you see is miles of people eating.

Nothing wrong with it. Food is good. But I think I am still missing the places where it’s not just us, the outsiders, being loud and drinking cheap wines. Maybe the neighborhoods are too jumbled with outsiders and insiders sharing space.

It’s a lot easier to feel the Nicoise air in the daytime. At night, the real city, for all its noise and late nightlife, hides itself.

from Nice: blue and yellow

Just when you think you love someone, I mean – some place, something happens to give you pause.

The morning was brilliantly yellow. It is by chance that so many of my photos reflect this.

First – what a difference a sunny day makes! Compare the terrace in the morning to the shadowy one of last night:





A walk to the market presents a different Nice – the older section of town is stunningly pretty. Okay, yes, pastel colorful. And in the distance, the hills show off the older villas. A place to visit. Another day.





A Provencal market is always terrific. This one is rich in sunflowers and zucchini blossoms. Candied fruits, berries, garlic, olives – someone come here and write a story, just about this market! Or pay me to do it!













By 11 I am itching to take my readings to the beach. And the world turns bright blue.





The warning is up – do not swim today, there is a medusa infestation (some ignore this and regret it). I hadn’t intended to swim. A rented chair, a towel and tons of sunscreen and I am set. Six hours of reading, interrupted by people watching.





Oh, a break for lunch, too. Salad Nicoise, delivered to my chair.





As this is France, beaches are basically topless. (Not everyone sheds their bikini top, but many do.) There is an etiquette out there. The woman who changed in public – that’s a no no. Keep your bottom covered.

But breast bronzing is the thing to do and there is something so liberating to see that people do not exploit this freedom by labeling it as anything but what it is – quite natural. You have to experience it to know what a relief it is to be in this non-charged atmosphere – to see waiters delivering food to topless women of all shapes and sizes, to see children not even noticing who is wearing what, to have people walking the city beaches and accepting as normal that which is, after all, normal.

I have this terrific photo of three people – a woman, topless as it were, lying on the beach. A beautiful young thing, enjoying a quiet moment by the water. Next to her is her male friend, applying lotion. Just behind them is an enormously paunchy man, looking out to the sea. It’s a great shot, if I do say so myself. And of course, I cannot post it, because inevitably, someone will be offended and, well, I want to remain employed.

So, Ocean remains pure and blue, just for you. At least until I retire.





In the evening, Nice turned a different face toward me and for a while I questioned my love affair with her.

I went to a restaurant that is listed as inexpensive. It wasn’t exactly that, but okay, I can order well. No, maybe I can’t. Two appetizers??? What an oinker I can be when faced with baby artichoke salad and a fried zucchini blossoms with tomato sauce (the Nicoise specialty) on the menu.







And then the shellfish. Uncomplicated. Perfect. Finished with simple red berries and homemade vanilla – berry-swirl ice cream.








So what’s the issue? Some guide book wrote that this is where Elton John and his partner like to dine, on a fairly regular basis (they have a villa up those hills). So the place has been discovered by the glamorous. And the tone of Nice suddenly changes for me, so that it becomes like Cannes and it’s still all very fresh, but it seems somehow dishonest. Like it’s a show. A parade of the affluent in this purportedly cheap, "local" restaurant.

And the waiters cater to this client base, of course. The wine – most certainly expensive wine – flows freely, and the laughter is loud, too loud and even though I am given a lovely outside table, I can’t wait to leave.

Nice. A complicated city. But oh, those blues and yellows – you know I’ll wake up in the morning loving Nice so deeply, as if it were my town. Life is like that. The good things stick in the memory far longer than the not so good.

from Nice: colors

So this is Nice. My Pierrerue of 07. What a difference.

Last June, I shut myself away from everything in the little village of Pierrerue, in the Languedoc. So little was it, that I had to hike for several miles to reach a grocer or a café.

This year, a friendly stranger at a chance meeting in La Rochelle said – you should go to Nice. And so this is where I am. To work, to think, and to look at colors. This is Matisse and Chagall land. An old city of constant sunshine and soft cream buildings. At least that’s my image of the place.

My train pulls into Nice in the evening. Last stop on a run through France’s Riviera – Cannes, Antibes, ticked off, minutes apart.



Antibes train station


I am here for a week and the small hotel is a lovely old thing. So… Nice-like. The garret room has a tiny balcony where I can sit with a glass of rosé late at night. At least that is what I think I am expected to do, for I find a chilled bottle in the room, waiting for me after dinner, along with fruit pates.



in the shadows of the evening, a balcony with a view


I had taken a quick walk to the shore – a half dozen blocks away. Nice at dusk. Is Nice nice? First impressions, first sightings. You tell me. I wanted a complicated French city – one with character. Nice looks to be just that.



evening beaches




evening cream




evening balcony


Dinner? I was directed to a cheap Provencal restaurant around the corner. Oh, it was the usual wonderful local fare. Baby artichoke salad, grilled fish, strawberry napoleon. And rosé. The colors. I am here for the colors. I think that part will be easy.



baby artichokes with shaved parmesan



fish over Provencal veggies



strawberry napoleon

from Paris: departures

Goodbyes, separations, departures, transitions -- I dislike all of them.

My daughter flies home on Wednesday and the only nice thing about it is that she will be rejoining others, who have been waiting patiently for her return.

Tuesday was spent on strolling, admiring (Paris. Foods. Stores. Architecture. Obviously.) and photo taking.

None of the photos are of the usual stuff. They are of faces rather than places. One is now on the sidebar of Ocean, the other – here you are, this is us, eating lunch.





She boards a plane, I board a train. Nine hours later she’ll be in Chicago, seven hours later, I’ll be in Nice. She’s got work to do, I’ve got work to do.

She wont post, but I will. From Nice.