Nice

Day 1 - We flew from Frankfurt to Nice on an early flight. As soon as we arrived and took the shuttle to the car rental, it became clear that we'd packed all wrong. I knew it was going to be warmer than Frankfurt - which had just dipped into a wintry spell - but I wasn't prepared for it being quite so hot. Here's the Promenade d'Anglais looking all tropical:

I've wanted to see Nice for a long time, more for its being one of those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English destinations that pops up in literature than out of any expectation of finding it as I imagined or wanted it to be. And indeed it wasn't. The front, even from the plane, was more built up than I expected - as far as the eye could see. I hoped to be more excited by the view of the sea - after all, I've been living land-locked for many years now - but it was somehow a bit flat and undramatic, and I was surprised to find that the beach in front of the Promenade was composed of big stones, like Brighton. It was full of orangey-brown near-naked people sunbathing, an activity I find hard to fathom, especially if it involves lying around on rocks and not sand. It must take some dedication.

We were staying in a hotel (Le Panoramic) on a hill behind the town, with a good view over the whole. The picture below sums up the whole, built high and narrow, and somehow giving a sense of everything being scraped together and far from affluent.

The hotel was nice and friendly, rooms a little small and old-fashioned, but somehow appropriate to Nice. We got good advice on driving down the hill and leaving our car in one of the free lots at the bottom, to take the new tram line into town. What we didn't, unfortunately, realize was that the "solo" (single) tickets we travelled either way on were the only tickets that didn't work for the park-and-ride lot that we were in, leading to a bit of drama when we couldn't get out of it in the evening and thought with horror that we were going to have to pay the 48 Euro "adjustment" listed on the machines. We got around it in the end somewhat more cheaply by buying some kind of transfer tickets for 3 Euros, then travelling one stop out and back (tickets are validated in machines on the trams).

We visited the old town and had a disappointing lunch at a kind of corner snack bar - a silly mistake driven by the lateness of the hour by the time we got there. I could have had the chick-pea flour pancake I'd been looking forward to trying, but instead we ordered some kind of pizza-like slices and some little dim-sum-like things that I thought had anchovies in them (they were labelled as Niçoise) but were actually full of pork. The old town was full of narrow streets and satisfyingly pretty, even though quite touristy.

After the old town, we walked a little along the front - where a man tried the gold ring scam on us. Not that we knew that there was such a thing as the gold ring scam in advance, but his behaviour was very strange, and luckily we're not the kind of people to take a gold ring that some stranger is holding out to us anyway - myself, I'd be far too concerned about what I should do with it and where I should best hand it in.

Once we'd walked through the market area and into the main part of town looking (unsuccessfully) for a bookshop (Smollett said there were none in 1764 - perhaps it's still true?), we were overcome by the heat and sunshine and took refuge in a cinema where we saw the first film showing in English that afternoon, My Life with Liberace. It was a good way to spend the afternoon. We haven't been to the cinema since arriving in Frankfurt, where it takes some effort to find anything showing without German dubbing. It was a good film too - less a biopic about Liberace than an interesting and uncomfortable portrait of bad relationship.