Firenze 2006-2007: Nice and Monaco

Monday, October 09, 2006

Nice and Monaco

This weekend, West, Alex, Courtney, Brie, Lindsay, and I went to the French Riviera. While all six of us traveled up there and back together, we split up into two groups for the rest of the weekend.
We left Florence on the last train for Pisa on Thursday night, which got there at about 2:00am. From Pisa, we caught our overnight train to Nice at 3:09am. We didn’t get a couchette this time as the ride was only about 7 hours and we thought that we could all get a good enough sleep in the seats that fold down into beds. We all got into our compartment, but it turned out that they had partially doubled booked our compartment, so we shared it with an Italian guy for several hours before he got off. At that point, we turned the compartment into a 5x7 bed for six people. We all managed to sleep a bit, but were all way cramped and no one really got a restful sleep.
At 9:45 on Friday morning, we pulled into Nice, from there, Brie, Lindsay, and Courtney headed for a friend’s house while West, Alex, and I headed for our hotel that was just a two minute walk from the station. After checking in and dropping our stuff off, we headed into the city center and to the beach. We took the panini that we had brought from the villa and ate at the beach before picking out a spot, taking a swim and then a nap there. The water there was a bright, almost luminescent blue for the first 30 meters or so before turning to the darker blue of most oceans. We all went for a swim before going back and napping. When we all woke up, we looked around and noticed a waterfall way up above us on a cliff. We saw stairs leading up so we made the hike and made it to this waterfall overlooking all of Nice, so we got some great views there and got to look around some of the historical stuff up there, like a cemetery and castle ruins. From there, we headed down the back way to the true city center, the touristy place with all the neat little shops and stuff like that. As it was getting to be about dinner time, we decided to go find a place to eat, but never really did. We walked around more, and at about 8:00 we headed back to the city center and went to a Belgian bar where we got Framboise and Kriek beer (Strawberry and Cherry). After that, we were pretty hungry so we found a place to get crepes. It was a little store in the center of Nice, and we ended up talking to the lady that owned it, Natalie for about an hour while we all ate. She spoke hardly any English and us hardly any French so it was definitely an interesting experience. The crepes were amazing, I had one with Nutella while Alex and West had one with butter and sugar. From there, we headed back over to the casino on the water, but as we didn’t really think to bring any kind of ID apart from our photocopies of our passports, we couldn’t get in. We settled with eating a cheeseburger at McDonalds and heading back to the hotel as we were all going on a lack of sleep from the previous night.
We slept in the next morning, so once we got up it was almost time to think about lunch. We all got baguettes, cheese, and meat, with wine and took it to the Russian Church in Nice, and ate picnic style on the grounds. It was such a good meal, and one of the things that I’d wanted to do while in France. From there, we headed back to the beach and looked around a different part of nice. We also made it into the casino as we all brought ID this time. We played several 20euro cent games, and played with any other coins we found, which we actually found quite a few of. After the amusement wore off a bit, we headed back to the hotel and began to get cleaned up for our night out in Monaco. We all got dressed up with our black shoes and pants, white shirts, and black ties. We then went and got a great three course French meal at a restaurant around the corner before heading to Monaco on the train. After a twenty minute ride, we were in the richest country in the world. Literally every other car we saw was a 50,000+ dollar car, most of them being of the Ferrari or Aston Martin class. We headed to the casino Monte Carlo, which was the highlight of the nightlife there, and after getting in, we watched people throw down to play 10,000euro hands like it was nothing. We went to the euro slots and play about 10euro each, and West actually won 45, so he bought us crepes and cherry beer back in Nice later that night. After looking around the casino, we went out into the grounds and explored the gardens that overlooked the ocean. We spent the entire evening there pretty much in awe of all the wealth and just the general quality of living that the entire city-country seemed to enjoy. I decided that Monaco is my favorite country and that once I become a millionaire millionaire, I want to live there. We went back to Nice on the last train of the evening and headed back to Natalie’s crepe place, ate a few more crepes and then got one more pint of Kreik beer before heading back to the hotel for a few hours of sleep before heading back home early the next morning.
Our train left Nice at 6:45am we stopped over in Ventimiglia for about an hour, got breakfast, and then were on a 4 hour train to Milan before another hour plus layover before finally getting on that last train of the day back into Florence. We made it back to the villa at about 5:30, talked to the people who were already back and then ate dinner before getting down to the homework that we had neglected the previous few days.