Day 18 - St. Paul de Vence and Nice

This morning we went to a medieval town called St. Paul de Vence. What sets this beautiful town apart from other medieval towns in France is that this place is full of contemporary art. Here you will find shops that sell paintings, sculptures, designer clothes, home decor and other art and craft products. This is a small town I could easily spend a day in to soak up the artistic atmosphere, as long as my camera doesn't run out of memory. Too bad we had a very tight schedule to keep and we had to leave at around lunch time, but not before we bought some t-shirts and small home decos.

We then went to the famous party town Nice. One noteworthy fact about the beach of Nice is that, for some unknown reasons, many female visitors of the beach prefer not to have their upper bodies covered when sunbathing. An interesting phenomenon like this definitely deserve repeated visits from curious tourists like me. Both the weather and the female sunbathers were beautiful at the beach, but not the sand. In fact, the beach is not covered in sand, but small pebbles. I heard that Cannes, which is not too far away from Nice and is frequented by movie stars during the Cannes Film Festival, sand has to be regularly brought in sand to replenish the beach. So, there you have it, French Riviera may have the weather, movie stars and topless girls, but their beach is nowhere near as good as ours in Australia.

BTW, according to a travel TV program in Melbourne, Nice is the cheapest place to stay in French Riviera (just thought you might want to know).

Tonight we decided to have our dinner in style. We traveled to a town called Eze on top of a mountain, where we could see the beautiful French Riviera from there while sipping champaign. The traditional French restaurant we dined in tonight was nicely decorated and their lamb shanks were roasted with wood fire. The food was excellent (I had roast lamb shank) but the view was even better. French tradition demands everyone at the table to drink a shot of rocket fuel (at least that's what it tasted like, I  don't remember the name of the drink) at the end of the dinner before we were allowed to go home.

On the way home, as I struggled to stay awake, I was glad that our driver Mimo didn't take a single sip of the rocket fuel.