Nifty Nice

After a heavy dose of tourism in Italy, we decided to take it a little easier for the next couple of days while we were in Nice. Since we didn’t do too much in Nice, we didn’t take many photos either, but what few we did take can be seen here.

We arrived in the Nice rail station early evening after a long train journey from Rome that took us through Pisa, Florence and Monaco. We checked into our hotel, found a nice Italian restaurant and had a good meal and some excellent dessert.

We woke up the next morning without much of a plan for the day so we went a wandering. We ended up walking down to the old part of Nice which had a great market and atmospheric, old French style streets which we spent some time nosing around.
As we were next to a large hill, we decided to head up (via a lift) to take a look of the city. At the top was a park and the views of the city and surrounding area were spectacular. While up there, we ran into an Aussie who had the same Kathmandu bag as us; we ended up talking to him for a bit. It was nice to speak to someone from our neck of the woods for a change.
It was quite warm by the time we got down the hill, so we headed back to the hotel, got our togs and towels and headed down to the beach. The beach was reasonably busy, and scattered with topless sunbathing women (not the attractive kind unfortunately). We spent a couple of hours there sunbathing, swimming in the Mediterranean, and relaxing on the stony beach.
We spent the rest of the day getting train reservations sorted, doing some much needed laundry in a dodgy area around the corner from our hotel, and going on a tram ride to a particularly uninteresting part of Nice.

The next day, before heading to the train station I came across an unusual site early in the morning. On my way back from the dodgy laundromat (after drying some wet laundry) I looked down a side street and saw it was packed with Muslim men sitting silently and motionless in the road. They had a sign sitting infront of them in French. I’m guessing it was something to do with Ramadan (which was on at the time), or some kind of silent protest. Either way, it was a little weird.

We left a short time later on a train to the town of Carcassonne.