TUESDAY, JUNE 26, 2012

NICE, FRANCE

This was our last day in Nice so we wanted to spend the day here just sight-seeing and enjoying the absolutely gorgeous Mediterrean sea. From the moment we arrived in Nice the weather has been perfect! Sunny with blue skies and temperatures between 75 and 81 degrees. With the sea breeze the humidity is very low. Glorious weather all week!

We stayed in bed until about 8:30 which was nice. We decided we wanted to have a late breakfast and we were really hungry for omelets. We got ready and asked the guy at the front desk (not our Francois) where to go for good omelets and he scoffed and told us the French do not eat eggs for breakfast. Well, OK then. We headed to the Pedestrian Street and all of the cafes had omelets on the menu so??? We picked a cafe, Le Lorraine, on a side street we hadn't walked down before. We had a cool waiter who is Croatian and has lived in five or six different countries. He speaks eight languages! He had lived the previous five years in Ireland and we thought his English had an Irish accent. He was very nice. We had our usual omelets -- ham and cheese for me and cheese for David and they came with a small salad and delicious fries!

After breakfast we walked down all of the streets we had missed before and looked in some shops. Once again we did not buy anything. We are not very good consumers, are we? Well, we have no room in our luggage to bring anything home so that's why we aren't buying anything. There are so many cute t-shirts and souvenirs that I would love to bring home but I can't do it. Maybe on another trip.

We went down to the Promenade and walked along the sea for a long, long time. A few times we would sit on a bench and people-watch. There were hundreds of people along the beach. As I mentioned before, the beaches in Nice are beautiful, but they have pebbles instead of sand so they don't look that comfortable to us. We saw people struggling to walk from their towels to the water and back. We prefer sandy beaches. But we're in France so we can't really complain about anything, can we?

On the Promenade there was a little train-like thing that takes you on a tour of Nice. We decided to hop on and see where it took us. There were headsets provided and you could pick your language. It was actually very fun and took us to most of the places we had already been but gave us a little history on them. We learned that Nice was founded 5,000 years ago by the Greeks. Then the Romans took over about 2,500 years ago. The Barbarians eliminated the Romans and then the Normans took it over. I might be skipping over some of the details but that's the Cliff Notes. Hey, I'm on vacation!

On the way back to our hotel we stopped at a pharmacy to buy some Tylenol and it was the coolest little store. There wasn't much sitting on the shelves but the pharmacist had rows and rows of narrow drawers that different medicines were stored in. Very neat. And the pharmacy doesn't sell much other than medicines. They had a few cosmetics on the shelves but that was it. Not even any candy bars or the like!

We arrived back at our hotel and retired to the garden, as usual. David read the paper and I wrote in my blog and we relaxed. I haven't mentioned that in the garden is a big cage with two parrots living there. They are beautiful and mostly bright red. And there are also at least two cats living there and they really want to get those parrots! Yesterday we watched one of the cats attempt to jump on the side of the cage many, many times for over an hour. He would make it almost to the top of the cage and then fall off. Not that he could have gotten into the cage anyway. And those red birds taunted him relentlessly! They walked up and down on their perches and they kiss all the time. It's very cute. I tried to get a picture but I don't know if it will come out or not. This comment is for Carol: David calls the cage their birdoir!

We finally went inside and checked out because we had to leave at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday. We then got ready for dinner. We wanted to go to Cave 35 for wine before dinner. We really like hanging out there! We arrived about 6:30 and, once again, we were the only people in there. We had our usual wine and appetizer and sat and talked about the whole trip and how much fun we were having. This has been an unbelievable trip and we feel so fortunate we got to take it! One glass led to another which led to another. We had a ball! Then we needed to eat so we just went back to our hotel for dinner and it was delicious once again. For a starter I had an artichoke and parmesan cheese salad and David had a little bit of lettuce salad and asparagus in a cream sauce. Both salads were excellent! For our main courses we both had the risotto finished with white truffle oil -- extremely good. For dessert I had creme brûlée and David had fresh local strawberries with cream. Another fabulous meal. We lingered as long as we could because we definitely did NOT want to leave Nice and we loved our hotel but . . . we finally went in to bed because Wednesday we had to make our journey back to Paris.