Day 85...Nice is nice - 19th September

Spent most of the morning on the internet and making phone calls. Its so good to call home! The funny thing is for me, the night before I make a call home, I have these freaky dreams where they're injured or dead or something and I don't get to call. But all is well and very happy.

About midday we headed down to the beach, whic was about 800m from our apartment. Nice's beaches are quite pretty - long stretches with no sand but loads and loads of grey pebbles. The water is very aqua blue at the edge, but not clear at all due to the salt factor. I like the pebbles as I hate getting sand blown all over me so I turn into a basted chicken. The pebbles were hard to lie on though, but one section they had poured sand over it so we popped our towels there. We swam and sunbaked for awhile. The water was so milky with so much salt. Nate said the area has a really high salt content (and told me later that he had some fun floating in it, which is easy to do when its really salty. I didn't think of that so didn't try).

Refreshed, we searched for a baguette on the way home for lunch, but in this part of France for some reason, its quite hard! We went home empty handed and got stuck into the groceries we bought. We drank red wine and ate olives, brie & roquefort cheese, and bread stick. Yum! We relaxed on our inside balcony and watched what we've now named "The Birds".

Its quite a freaky thing to see: our views is of a nondescript car partk, but every day all day the place is packed with middle to old aged men. They look turkish or slightly middle-eastern. All they do is sit around and talk and perch on things. Its most bizarre. a) wouldn't you hang around somewhere nice, like a park or beach? b) what do they do all day? You look outside the window and theres all these little old men perched on benches and cars. Its a bit like Alfred Hitchcocks "the birds" but with little old men. Spooky!

Later on, we felt comfortable enough with the city to walk down into old town. Vieux Nice looks pretty much the same since the 1700's and was very cute. We drank cheap cocktails (white russions - channelling 'the dude' Kristin!) and watched the sky go dark. Then we ate some Italian in a small square and home to bed, munching on some gelati on the way.