(Mis)Adventures: June 2010

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Nice/Eze, France - Monaco

We arrived in Nice on Monday night and met our next host, Quentin. He's from Paris originally but lives in Nice near all of his family. His English is really good because he spent seven or eight years living in Los Angeles as a teenager. He also had another girl there couchsurfing as well so there was five of us in total. We relaxed for the evening chatting about anything and everything over a couple of pizzas and some drinks. Nice has all the feel of a beach town plus the feel of being quite wealthy. For years, lots of people have frequented the area because of the appeal of the French Riviera.

In the modern times, the British did more than anyone to popularize the area by claiming it had healing qualities. In reality, it was just a prescription by many English doctors for sick wealthy patients of a change of climate. After being there, it's easy to understand why they said that. Many of the French noted that the area seemed to simply fill with the ugliest half dead brits they'd seen. Nice is only a recent arrival to France as it was once part of the Italian territory until it was given to the French as a gift for helping the Italians gain independence from Austria. The city also once functioned as a point of exodus for many Jewish people during the outbreak of the second world war. The next day the three of us plus Quentin headed out to see Nice. He was very nice and wanted to show us around the old part of the city and to make sure we had a good time. We had some coffee at a small cafe before making our way down to the main square called Massena Square. Throughout the square, there are seven statues like the one in the picture of humans sitting or standing on a platform and Quentin told us they represent the seven different continents.

From there, we walked through a vegetable/fruit market on our way to the seashore where we were able to see a wonderful view of the whole shoreline and the water looked amazing but the beach was covered in rocks instead of sand. We hiked up the Colline du Chateau, where we were able to get a birds eye view of everything. One of the neatest things about Nice is the airport. It's out on a little swath of land so that the planes land and take off right alongside the beach. Up on the hill is a large waterfall that provides some very refreshing spray on hot days so needless to say, we hung around there longer than we should have.

Afterwards, Quentin took us to a local place that serves a version of crepes called socca. It's something like a crepe but its made from chickpeas instead of regular flour. After our tour with Quentin, we hopped in the car and drove up the coast to a small village called Eze.

It's a medieval town in which the architecture has been completely preserved but the place is crawling with fake artisan shops selling overpriced retail stuff. It has seen the French, Italians, and Arabs through the years. They all fought to have the coveted lookout point as it provides a great way to defend the area. The restaurants sell the typical over priced low quality food and the whole place has just been ruined it seems by the tourism industry. It honestly looked like a mall concept in which they decided to use a medieval town as the decor.

The large crows of people inspired us to head on. I talked the girls into going to Monaco because we were so close. Monaco, of course, is famous for its lack of taxes, being full of rich people, the formula one track, and the Monte Carlo Casino. We drove around for about thirty minutes just checking out the sites and it was incredibly gaudy. The Monte Carlo Casino front was being regulated by the police because there was a film set trying to make a movie. We drove through the area twice in hopes of being caught on film. We saw a lot of people milling about like they were extras in the movie and they just had to wait on the police to get control of traffic. The casino itself looked like a palace. We drove down to the docks and saw some of the most insanely posh boats in the world. The yachts were definitely bigger than many of the houses we've seen.

After bumper to bumper traffic, closed streets, and tons of people, we broke down and called it quits and headed back to Nice. We spent the rest of the evening at Quentin's place for a party he was having for other couchsurfers in the area. The meeting was about everyone taking a hike together somewhere near Nice in the mountains.

Millau/Montlaur, France

After our stay in Toulouse, we packed up to head all the way to the eastern city of Nice. In talking with our hosts in Toulouse of our journey, they mentioned the problem of French tolls. We did some investigating and discovered that the direct journey to Nice would cost us around 50€ to do the trip so we decided to take back roads half the way so as to only pay 25€ overall. The idea turned out to be quite enjoyable as the French countryside we rode through was beautiful. We wound our way along a stretch of highway called the Route de Millau. We discovered that the south of France is covered in nice rolling hills full of farms and beautiful scenery. We stopped at little places along the way to take tons of pictures.

We found the little town of Montlaur when we detoured to the Chateau de Montaigut because it sounded interesting. It was built in the 10th century as a way to protect the small town of St. Affrique. There were seven or eight different buildings on the hill top and tons of old farming equipment.

From Montlaur, we passed through St. Affrique. It had a nice church that sat on the edge of the river and provided a great backdrop against the mountains behind it. The town was lovely but we couldn't stay long due to the long drive we still had ahead of us to Nice(pronounced Neece).

From St. Affrique, we headed to Millau because it was recommended we go see the viaduct built there because it is the tallest bridge in the world. It's built from the design of a Frenchman and an Englishman, what could wrong there? We tried to continue on our route of no tolls but alas, we were thwarted by a detour that led us back up the mountain so that we had to ride across the bridge. It was a nice view and we began our pocket emptying trek of paying all the tolls. Enjoy the pics from across the south.

Toulouse, France

Our time for teaching finally ended and we started our three week journey home. We planned to rent a car and drive our way all through southern France on our way to a wedding in Paris. We left Madrid after a painful moving process of many trips on Friday night. We caught the night train from Madrid to Barcelona. In Barcelona, we caught a bus to Toulouse, the city in which we decided to start our journey. Of course, as always, there was a snag that caused some slight worries. The train conducters in Spain decided to have a 24 hour long strike on the day we left so our train was delayed an hour and a half.

The problem was that our bus was leaving two hours after the train got in so we lost a lot of our in between time. We caught a cab up to the bus station with twenty minutes to spare and thought we checked in since we received a piece of paper and were told to go downstairs to look for the bus time and platform. While waiting around, we ran into a friend of ours from Madrid that we had taught with. It was kind of strange to see him there but he had taken the night bus and had recently arrived. He was awaiting his parents for the beginning of their journey around Spain. After a goodbye, we found out where to line up for our bus and headed on over to get in line only to find everyone else holding a different bus ticket and putting sticky tags on their bags. Confused, we asked how to acquire the same things and were told to go upstairs and check in. Funny, we thought we had and why the hell didn't anyone behind the counter say an additional step was involved?

I went back up, stood in the long line again only to be told to go down to the counter that had no line nor a sign saying anything about checking in to get the tags and the bus ticket. Of course, as I'm walking over there, three people jump in the line, the guy gets a phone call, and nothing happens. After ten minutes and a frantic phone call from Iz saying she was getting the driver to wait for a few minutes, I got the stuff and ran out. We loaded up and were on our way. Eight hours later, we arrived in Toulouse.

As a modern city, Toulouse tops one million people and has a large economic base in the aeronautics department as it is home to Airbus, Galileo, SPOT, and also hosts one of Europe's oldest established universities. After some searching, we found our bus and made our way to our hosts' house. The newest part of this trip for us is joining the community of couch surfing. It's an online forum so travelers can meet locals and stay with them instead of being isolated in a hostel or hotel and stuck doing touristy stuff with only the advice of the guy at the counter. We spent the evening getting to know them and went to watch the USA embarrass themselves against Ghana. We had to eat dinner at a fast food type pasta place because for some reason, after 7 p.m. on Saturday night in Toulouse, restaurants only serve drinks and let you bring fast food pasta in to eat.

On Sunday, our hosts took us a to a local market near a church. There were stands of all kinds of fruit, vegetables, and other farm products and we bought some cherries and fresh stinky French cheese. We had lunch at their house made from all the fresh vegetables they bought, a roasted chicken, and our cheeses and wine. Afterwards, we went to a large outdoor swimming pool to relax and take a break from the heat. After our swim, we walked around the town and saw some really amazing stuff. The first thing we saw was an Arc type monument dedicated to the dead of the two World Wars at the end of the street with the beautiful botanical garden and a palace of some sort. Also near the arc monument is the beautiful cathedral of Saint Etienne. This cathedral is odd in comparison with the others we've seen around Europe due to some irregularities in the building design. It seems one direction was taken and later abandoned for another direction. Then, they tried to add on to the church with an even newer design. All of this spanned from the 13th to 16th centuries and makes for an interesting looking church. The inside is beautiful and completely different from the old part to the new part near the west portal. The choir stall is carved from walnut and actually includes mythological and pagan figures. We made our way from the church to the Capitole, the most famous building in Toulouse. As we walked through the streets, we realized its easy to see why Toulouse is called the Rose City because of its color. All the buildings are built from a brick that has a pinkish tint to it.

The Capitole was built almost 900 years ago and was the seat of government there for the Romans when they still ruled the area. We walked up the street from the Capitole when the weather told us we needed to walk along the river if we wanted to see it because a thunderstorm was to arrive soon. We had a lovely walk down the river and saw more amazing architecture like the School of Fine Arts and the infamous Pont Neuf. Originally built in the 1500's, the arches were supposed to look like the mane of lion. You can judge that for yourself.

We spent the rest of our evening hanging out with our hosts and their wonderful friends by having a picnic. At first, we kind of sat apart from all of the French speakers because we couldn't mutter more than our names or where we were from in French. Eventually though, they warmed up to us and we had a great time getting to know them. We are grateful to them for taking us into their home and showing us around town.