Nice play by play.

Okay, so I went to Nice, Monaco, and Avignon this past weekend. We started out on Thursday night with an overnight train, sleeping in a thing called a couchette. It's pretty much like a closet with or without air conditioning (completely random) and 6 beds in it. It's cramped, but the trade off is pretty much an extra day to travel on the weekends. So we got into Nice on Friday morning, found our hostel, and walked around the city for the rest of the day. We climbed a pretty high cliff that used to have a fort on top of it, now turned into a sweet public park. Oh yeah, it was raining for our entire weekend trip. The rare moments it stopped were glorious, but so were all of the others as Nice was like ten degrees Celsius warmer than Metz ever will be :) Afterward, we just walked up and down the entire length of Nice's beach on the promenade. The water is so blue it's unbelievable! And the rain clouds made for a pretty cool sunset too. Somewhere in this journey, I managed to stop twice at Mcdonalds. It's so tempting, even though I told myself I was going to avoid it at all costs. Sometimes I just need a solid, greasy breakfast. Chocolate croissants are very good, but you have to eat like 5 of them to feel satisfied, whereas two egg mcmuffins will do the trick. The second trip to the American Embassy was for dessert. One scoop of ice cream at a respectable restaurant will cost you five euros!? But a real ice cream shake from McDo (yes, real ice cream) is on the euro menu! Temptation at its finest.

The next day we hopped a 15 minute train to Monaco and made our way to the aquarium. Upon passing the palace and hoping to see the changing of the guard there, we saw that all these rally cars were in the square! We stayed for a bit to watch the awards ceremony for the 2009 Monte Carlo Rally. Quite cool. Then the aquarium--it was fantastic. I love underwater stuff, and this was the perfect time to explore the "Aquarium Mode" of my new camera. Oh boy! By the time we left it was dark, and we managed to walk by the famed casino before our train left for Nice again.

Avignon! On Sunday we left before the sun rose to catch yet another train to the land of the old popes. We toured the Palace of the Popes and the bridge of Avignon (which apparently collapsed like ten different times) with these free audio guides that look like ginormous old cell phones.

*Aside* My spellchecker recognizes ginormous as a legit word. You learn something new everyday.

There was also a really cool indoor market that we went to. At first, Avignon seemed really sketchy. But I guess it was just because the French don't leave their homes on Sundays except around mealtimes. After just five minutes of leaving the train station, we had to duck into another McDonalds just to escape a guy who was clearly tailing us. He saw us walking and stared us down until we walked past him, when he decided to take a leisurely stroll half a step behind us. Kind of scary, but I have no idea what he would have done as everyone carries their important things in inside jacket pockets. A+ for safety!

We had about five hours to kill before our train left for Metz at 12:30am, so we went to dinner for three hours, and a legit French movie for the other two: "Envoyes Tres Speciaux." It was about two radio reporters who are supposed to go to Baghdad to report the happenings, except they lose their plane tickets and money and end up staying in France. In short, they fake their capture by terrorists, then get the money from the ransom when they are "rescued." It was actually a good movie, and I could understand about 80% of what they said.

On a separate trip/not really a trip, I went to see the FC Metz game Tuesday night that got rescheduled on us two weeks ago because of ice! We played AC Ajaccio. It was an exciting 3-2 match in which, of course, Les Grenats (The Dark Reds/Maroons) prevailed. One penalty kick and two other goals came from pretty sweet set pieces. Our seats were in the 3rd row up right at midfield for five euros! We could have reached out and touched the players when they threw the ball in. Next time, however, I think we all want to get seats behind the goal, even though they're the same price as the midfield seats, because the supports section, albeit small, is wonderfully raucous.

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This concludes the recap of last week's travels. In recent days, I have played more indoor soccer, qualified for the unofficial GTL soccer team, showered, made chicken and turkey successfully, discovered the glories of Provincial herbs, and finally found sliced bread at the grocery store. What remains to be done is to clean my room and do laundry. I have only washed 3 pairs of boxers and all my socks so far because 1) I wear only one outfit between Thursdays and Sundays, 2) since I'm wearing many layers, I can rewear all my shirts multiple times, 3) washing machines are four euros and driers are 50 centimes per 15 minutes, so 4) I do them by hand in my shower. I am staying in Metz this weekend though, so I will have plenty of time on my hands to attend to such trivial things as "hygiene."

A Tout!

PS You can click the title of the post, "Nice play by play," for a direct link to my Picasaweb album which has many more pictures than this! I'll try to remember to link the titles in every post, but if I forget, the address is http://picasaweb.google.com/figel450