from Nice: accustomed to her face

So the city grows on you. You find your favorite beach, the best streets to walk, the place to return to for good seafood and it all fits.

And, too, there’s the market. Unlike in many other markets in France, where the vendors are engaged in the serious business of selling and visitors whose main purpose is to take pictures are barely tolerated, in Nice it’s different. Never too crowded, used to tourists, with constantly agreeable weather to boot, sellers smile at those who stop by. Even if it’s clear that there’s not going to be a sale.

Nice has a square that is stunning – closed to traffic, it is a great, spacious communal space. The first day I walked across it (it’s not a café-laden thing, it’s just a regular old square to pass on your way to somewhere), I paused for a moment and heard a little boy say to his dad as they first stumbled upon it: elle est belle! (she’s beautiful!)

She is that. Every day I would enter it and every day I would try to take a shot of her magnificence – but I hated all of the photos. You’re stuck with this last one. No more days in Nice. No more chances to try again.



Place Messena


My last day here. I don’t have to be wordy – you know exactly how I will have spent it. Chasing the blues of the sea and the golds and reds at the market. Wolfing down huge portions of fresh seafood. Drinking rosé wine. Ending with a berry napoleon and a noisette.


But my last notes here will be about the beach. (Yes, I go back to it now, as I’m speeding on a train to Paris.)

I’ve never hung out at a big city beach before. Coney Island, sure, but I was a kid and didn’t know any better.

For me, beaches are best when they are pristine and empty and golden and pure.

I was a beach kid once – I have always loved the sun, unfortunately, given its negative health associations. In various sea destinations, I would roll out a towel and resent the intrusion of others. Keep away from me! One hundred feet is too close! Move, already!

In Nice, I was right smack in the midst of it all. I mean, granted, I paid for a chair, so I had my wee little oasis of quiet. But I chose the chair closest to the public space. So that I could get a sense of Nice there, on this rocky strip of city beach.

And I did get a feel for it -- listening to the conversation of the old women who came regularly, watching generations of mothers and babies and grandmothers find a spot by the water…



three generations


…getting exasperated by the teenage boys who came late in the afternoon and threw pebbles at each other when the ball game got to be too much.

And I watched the visitors mingle with this slice of Nice and I saw the rules unfold – the keep this place clean! – attitude, so that no one left garbage behind, not the kid who finished his chips, not the adult who bought a beer from the peddlers that went back and forth. There's too much garbage already out there in our lives. Let this beach stay clean.

At the end of the day, the sea would always spit out several big waves that went further than all their predecessors. The people closest to the waterline would get drenched. Bags, towels, all of it – soaking wet. It was so predictable, that, around four, I wanted to walk along the edge and say – watch it, the sea is going to play a joke on you in a moment!

But of course, I didn’t. I’m just a passerby. Let the Mediterranean play its game – who am I to interfere. All I can do is keep my camera ready and record the moment. Here it is, the last big wave, creeping up to the woman who, like me, was trying to get some reading done by the water.



it's coming...



...it came



And here’s the rest of my Nice day. Told in the colors of this Provence port.


the market




































the sea









recording joy




salade Mediterranee




empty now



the dinner



leaving the hotel: Provence colors




dinner menu: colors of the sea




crustaceans




berry napoleon




walking home: various stages of closure

from Nice: stuck

On my last days now. I have got to tear myself from the adhesive that glues me to a beach chair each day. One town. Let me visit just one other town outside of Nice.

Okay, clouds in the sky in the morning. Good. I’m going to go take a train (all of fifteen minutes of it) to Cagnes-sur-Mer. Oh, damn. Sky is clearing. I’ll just hike over to the beach to tell Stephan not to hold the chair for me. It’s only right.

Warm breeze tickles me this way and that…

Maybe I’ll tell Stephan to hold the chair for the afternoon. I’ll be back for a few late hours…

Tickle, tickle…

What if it clouds over? I’ll have made him hold the chair and then I wont use it. Maybe I’ll sit on it this morning, for just an hour or so.

Caress, tickle.

Two hours. No more than that. Then off I go! Exploring!


The chair is there, waiting. Stephan hovers, wishes me a good day, I feel the glue taking hold, drying.

How could it not? Mornings are the best, out there, on the rocky waterfront. The older women of Nice come then. They lay their mats down and they swim a little and then they rest. By noon, they’re out. The younger set takes over, it gets crowded.





Mornings. Mists hang over the water. Little children are held tightly by papu, mami. Kissed and smiled over.





A cloud comes at 1. It’s a sign. I have to get up and get moving. I take my books back to the hotel and set out, by train, down the coast.

I’ve picked Cagnes-sur-Mer. Why? I’m still searching for a good spot to return to. I went from little Pierrerue, to big Nice. Shouldn’t I, next year, try something in between?

Cagnes has always attracted the artistic crowd. I’m in awe of that. Simone de Bouvoir wrote here. Renoir took one look at the village (it was then a village) and said “this is the place where I want to paint until the last day of my life.” So, lucky devil, he bought a house and it became to him what Giverny was to Monet – a dream place from which he could paint, sculpt and probably boss a few women and children around to wait on him. French painters of that era seemed especially skilled in that domain.

I had hopes especially for Haute Cagnes – the older part of town, perched on a hill, a bit of a hike up from the sea.





I pictured myself sitting on a terrace with a spectacular view toward the mountains of Provence...




... sipping a café crème and then maybe hiking down to the seaside, books and all, and then, toward the end of the day, writing away right back at the pretty café, where today I settled in for a lunch.




But in the course of the afternoon, I changed my mind about Cagnes. Sometimes you have to see a place before you can embrace/reject it. Cagens fell by the wayside. A beautiful place to visit. For an afternoon.





I did spend a little while at Renoir’s house, miffed again at the photo ban, but enjoying the feeling of quiet. Giverny’s gardens attract millions. Renoir’s little country home stands empty (of visitors; it has plenty of his paintings and sculptures) even now, at the height of the season. An interesting statement, though I’m not quite sure what it is a statement of.








I came back to Nice on the commuter train. Hot, crowded – a good way to travel. With those who do it on a daily basis. To work. From work. To the beach. To shop. To eat.

Oh yes, the matter of dinner. I am still processing it. The food was okay. Fine. Not off the planet spectacular, but fine. But I had a waiter with negative chemistry and by the end of the meal, he and I were glaring at each other. That has never happened to me in France, where a waiter’s tasks are routinely carried out with a professional flair, even in the smallest village brasserie. Sure, service can be slow, mistakes happen (at lunch, the waiter in Cagnes dropped a big salad into the lap of another diner. She laughed, we laughed – it happens), but waiters are very very adept at relating well to the customer. This man and I just had a tough evening together, which only goes to show that you cannot make generalizations about anything or anyone, my post of two days ago to the contrary, not withstanding.

But let me end on a sweet note. Berries and cream kind of note. I say this without reservation: dinner in France is always an event to anticipate with pleasure.

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.