2 posts tagged “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.
Today we set out to visit another must-see tourist attraction in Italy, the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The tower is a freestanding bell tower of the Cathedral of Pisa and its construct began in 1173. The tower itself is a work of art, built mainly with white marble over a period of over 177 years (that's right, 177 years and they still couldn't get it right at the end).
We got to the Tower of Pisa early in the morning (8:30am). We were so early the tower and the cathedral weren't even opened yet. It meant that we couldn't climb the 294-step stair to the top of the tower. There wasn't much to do and we had to leave not long after I took some trademark photos of May extending her hand to stop the tower from leaning any further.
We spent the next 5 hours on the coach before arriving Nice, France. That's right we had just concluded the Italian part of our trip. The first place we visited in Nice is a perfume factory. They said they mix and develop perfumes for big brand names but of course they didn't tell us what the brands are. It would be very strange if May came out of the factory empty-handed. At the end, she didn't disappoint us.
The place we would spend the night in was not just a hotel, it was a country club. It had absolutely everything: spa, two swimming pools, tennis courts (hard and clay), driving range and putting green. The dinner served in the hotel restaurant was exceptionally good.
Tonight we put on our best dinner suit (well, in my case, I had a beige business shirt that had been at the bottom of my backpack for almost 3 weeks, and a pair of trousers that had been receiving similar treatment), for we were about to hit the most luxurious casino in the world, Casino Monte Carlo. We were hoping that we would even get to meet some celebrities while we gamble there.
Movie is a wonderful thing. It turns ordinary things into extraordinary miracles. One such miracle is the Casino Monte Carlo, it is much smaller than I thought and was very, very quiet on the day we visited it. This is the first casino I had to paid to get into. Yes, the decoration inside is great but it felt more like a museum than a casino. Where is all the movie stars, high-rollers, spies and their beautiful companions? To make the matter worse, we lost 15 euro to the casino and that was on top of the 20 euro admission fee. I was not impressed.
