Nice, Antibes, and Northern Italy

I don't have my pictures from this past weekend uploaded yet, but I'll add the link here as soon as I get that done.

My week passed without excitement until the weekend, when I left for Nice to visit my roommate, Klare, from Marquette. Classes are going as well as can be expected, I suppose, and I survived my first Political Science presentation in an entirely different language. I’m really enjoying my economics class; the professor gets really into teaching the subject and the text is pretty interesting. I’m not taking any English classes while I’m here, and I really miss those. Hopefully I will not have forgotten how to write when I return to Marquette in the fall, as that would be most inconvenient.

Friday there were no classes, as usual, and so I went to L'Institut for a little while in the morning before going to the train station to buy myself a ticket from Nice to Avignon for Sunday. I was quite pleased that I was able to do so entirely in French. However, that got less exciting as the weekend went on given that I ended up buying several train tickets while speaking French. The director of l’Institut was going to Nice for the weekend, and so she offered me a ride there on Friday, which was very nice of her since I only had to buy a one-way train ticket then. The drive was beautiful, and she gave me a lot of history of the regions we drove through. Highways in France have numbers, but those numbers are hardly ever used. Instead, there are signs for the cities, so you have to know which cities you’re going through in order to get to your final destination. You can also pay with credit cards at the tollbooths, which I thought was pretty cool.

I got dropped off at the Nice train station around 5pm, and I then bought a round trip ticket to Antibes, which is where my roommate is (Second train ticket purchase in French). Unfortunately, it turns out that you have to use round trip tickets the same day (not the case on buses, which is why I bought it round trip) and so I accidentally donated €3,80 to SNCF. It’s about a 30 minute train ride to Antibes, and then I had about an hour and a half to walk around downtown until my roommate got out of classes. Antibes was remarkably more intelligent than Avignon at some point in its history and made the decision to get rid of the city walls. Apparently they left a small part of it somewhere for the charm, but they decided that perhaps city walls and streets meant for carriages weren’t conducive to modern life. It definitely looks a lot more like a modern city than Avignon does, which was a nice break after three straight weeks of antiquity. I spent most of my time peeking into several bookstores, which has become one of my favorite ways to pass time in France. I get a kick out of looking for books I read in English and seeing what they changed when translating it into French. I found a translation of one book I read in high school, and it took me a while to figure out that I had read it since they changed the names of the main characters from Remy and Dexter to Julie and Damien. The Harry Potter books are also great for finding quirks in the translation—Snape has an entirely different name, and unless my deductive reasoning skills are less than I think they are, the French word for wand is, that’s right, a baguette. I opened up Harry Potter et les Reliques du Mort to a random page, and Harry was insisting to Dumbledore that Voldemort had killed Harry with his baguette. After entertaining myself in the book stores and walking through the square at the center, I met Klare at the train station and we went back to her apartment for the night.

Saturday morning we (Klare, her two roommates, and I) got up early to go get pastries for breakfast before we left for Northern Italy. I had a delicious almond croissant. It was absolutely amazing, and I definitely didn’t regret skipping the pain au chocolat even though I still haven’t tried that. We went over to the train station to buy our tickets (third train ticket purchase in French) to Ventimiglia. The trip took about an hour, and we went through Monte Carlo before getting to Italy, which I suppose technically means I can add not just Italy, but also Monaco to the list of countries I’ve been to. The train runs right along the sea most of the time, and it was absolutely beautiful to watch. We walked around Ventimiglia for a while looking for a market that one of the girls had been to before (and looking at all the delicious pastries in every bakery window), but it wasn’t going on that day, so we decided to go ahead and go to San Remo, which Klare had heard really good things about. It was only about a ten minute train ride there, and we started exploring the city with no particular agenda.

One of the things we all noticed about Italy is the fact that people actually wear colors there. The French definitely prefer black, and just walking down a block in Ventimiglia we saw several wonderful shades of red! It also felt like it had a much cheerier atmosphere. In Avignon, the people at l’Institut tell us strictly that there is to be no smiling in the streets, because no one smiles in the streets (which is true), but in Italy there were lots of people who looked happy to be there. Everyone we encountered was also wonderful about the language barrier. I was a little worried about going to Italy where all I knew was ‘grazie’. However, all the people were fantastic about it, and no one got upset when I accidentally responded in French or when we had to resort to pointing to get our message across. There was also some sort of festival going on for Carnival and Mardi Gras, so all the little kids were dressed up in costumes, which was really fun to see.

We did a lot of wandering around San Remo before we found a pizzeria where we very fittingly had pizza in Italy—it was delicious! The waiter spoke broken French, so we communicated through that and pointing, as well as a few key words some of the girls knew from Spanish. We did some shopping at a story that had a ton of sales (I got two shirts and a sweater for €14), then walked down by the sea for a while before stopping to get some gelato. The gelato was absolutely amazing, and I thoroughly enjoyed it even though it wasn’t remotely healthy (I bought an apple later out of my guilt). We found some really cool gardens in San Remo as well. They had a lot of palm trees and cacti, which made me feel like I was in a different world. I still can’t get over the shock of seeing flowers in bloom in February. Our train back to Ventimiglia had compartments we could take for ourselves with closing doors, which was quite the novelty. We spent another hour or so walking around Ventimiglia (where I successfully managed to avoid buying a chocolate cannoli). The big highlight of that time was figuring out where to get our passport stamped. We were pretty sure that the people at the ticket booths didn’t speak English, but we really didn’t want to leave Italy without getting a stamp in our passports to prove that we’d been there. The other girls decided I would be elected to go ask where we could get our tickets stamped (since I was the only one who knew French), and the guy told us he could stamp them. I’m sure he was wondering why the crazy girls were so excited about a passport stamp, but it sure made our day!

After arriving back in Antibes, we decided to attempt making croissants, so we did a run to the grocery store by their apartment. It was by far the biggest grocery store I’ve seen since coming to France, and I had a blast looking around at everything. We decided that we were going to make the croissants more like pain au chocolat by buying chocolate to stuff in them. We bought the cheapest generic chocolate we could find, and it was still absolutely delicious. Making the croissants was considerably harder than we’d anticipated, partially because the recipe was using US measurements, and we were only able to measure using the metric system—and not even that accurately then, since we didn’t have anything that would measure less than 200 grams. After using two calculators and making one phone call to the US to have someone there look up the conversion online, we finally guesstimated enough to form the dough. Unfortunately, the work was far from over as we had to roll it out several times, then fold it up, then let it rest for 30 minutes, then repeat. We decided to just refrigerate it overnight a little before midnight because we were too tired to keep going. This might have been a bad decision, but we probably made so many mistakes that it can’t all be blamed on that decision. When I got up this morning I rolled the dough out one more time and then shaped the croissants while filling them with chocolate before letting them rise. They didn’t rise as much as they were supposed to, which suggested that perhaps we didn’t put enough yeast in (or maybe we put in too much flour…or too much butter…or not enough salt…). After baking, we discovered that they definitely were not as fluffy as normal croissants are, though we had achieved the layered quality on the inside. The moral of the story: when in doubt of your baking abilities, just stuff the pastries with chocolate and they’ll always taste good.

Today (Sunday) I took the train back to Nice and hung out there for about an hour and a half until my train left for Avignon. I walked around the city for a little while, but there wasn’t a lot to see since pretty much everything shuts down in France on Sundays. The only restaurants open were McDonalds and KFC, and it seemed to me that most of the people in the train station were speaking English. I had a seat next to the ticket window for a while, and listening to everyone check to make sure the vendor spoke English made me feel much better about my ability to speak French. I might have an accent that they don’t appreciate, and I might make plenty of mistakes, but at least I can get my message across. The train ride back to Avignon was uneventful, and I then took a bus into the city and a taxi to my house (the buses to my house don’t run Sundays, but I get about €10 a week from L’Institut to use for taxi rides). Despite the fact that I’d eaten far too much junk over the weekend and I really didn’t ever want to look at food again, Mireille set out the following for dinner: An entire quiche Lorraine, a beef and carrot stew, pea soup, rice, bread, and cheese. This struck me as a lot of food for two people, and she then informed me that she wasn’t at all hungry, so I should just eat whatever I wanted, and that there was some chocolate mousse for me in the fridge. I have a theory that she’s trying to fatten me up Hansel and Gretel style, and thus I’ll be heading to the gym tomorrow morning after my first class in an attempt to counter that. Mireille’s incredibly sweet, but if I ate everything she offered me I’d have to go buy all new clothing to fit me.

I don’t have any big plans for this week, though I do want to do some shopping on Friday before the ‘soldes’ end. The soldes are big sales that last until next Saturday, and most stores have things up to 70% off, so I figure this is my chance to buy things in France without going broke. I have mid terms next week, which won’t be a whole lot of fun, but after that I get to leave for London and Wales for my first break. I’m really looking forward to that, especially since I had such a blast traveling today. And best of all, a land where they speak English!