nice is nice

I love the south of france. Love it. This is the only place I have really wished we could spend a whole week in. Maybe next trip! Anyway, didn't write last night because I wanted an activity to occupy myself on the long drive to Annecy away from the sun and the beach and into the Alps. You can imagine how excited I am about that lol. But we are getting to see a lot and now I deinitely know where I want to come back to. Yesterday we woke in Arles, which is a kind of run-down town and actually it was freezing. But we didn't stay long because the beach was just an hour or so drive away and that's where we were headed. We stopped though in salon de provence and cindy was hoping to see nostradamus' house or his burial place - but the house (now a museum) was closed till the afternoon and we had the beach waiting for us. Tried to go to the burial place but a baptism was going on inside the church which didn't stop cindy from popping in and taking a picture. I pretended not to know her. Anyway from there we drove to the beach and were overwhelmed by the gorgeous scenery. I think it might be the most beautiful coastline I have ever seen. We stopped for lunch in a town called Frejus where we walked through town and it was warm enough for me to take my sweater off and walk around in my tank top. But lunch was a bit of a problem - one thing I have learned about france is that lunch literally ends at 2:00. It is crazy, every restaurant we would walk into around 2:15 would greet us with a resounding "fin!". Sure, it's on the late side for lunch, but it's a crowded town full of people. I can't believe none of them want to eat after 2. Something I have learbed about the french per the newspapers and the people is that while americans think "if I work more, I'll make more money," the french think, "if I work less I'll have more time to sit around mocking those crazy workaholic americans.". It's fascinating. Everyone's on strike all the time because they want more money for working less and anyway it means a day off. I read that the french inherently see working at all as exploitation. Different culture I guess. Or not so different from some of my genx buddies come to think of it... Anyway we managed to find a chinese place which I dubbed "le panda express" which was willing to serve us after 2 pm. All hail the chinese work ethic. Food was okay, but what more than made up for it was the yummy incredible gelato place with tons of unique flavors. I got meringue flavor which came with a meringue cookie in it and cindy got a flavor simply calle "bleu" with a picture of a smurf next to it. Tastes like bubble gum, turned her tongue blue, cindy was happy, and we went down to the beach and sat on the rocks and ate our yummy ice cream. I could have stayed there forever doing just that but Nice was awaiting us. We took an amazing drive along the coast which basically to me looks like Utah and Santa Barbara had sex and created this place. I can't describe it, you will just have to see the pics when I can put them up. Anyway we dropped off our luggage at our excellent, perfecly located Hotel Regence in Nice. Then we drove to Monaco for dinner, which was another adventure. It's one of the prettiest places you can imagine. We went to see the Palace, and it was almost empty so the whole town looked like an empty movie set. We once again had trouble finding a restaurant open and this was even more puzzling since it was 7 pm. It seemed the entire town (all the merchants etc) were watching the grand prix races on tv. We did find a restaurant - we were literally the only ones in there and I am officially sick of french food. But now I have been to monaco! We then headed back to our hotel and crashed. This morning we explored Nice and the area around our hotel was total 3rd street promenade but I've been away so long I missed it :). Now we're on our way to Annecy but we were both sad to leave this area as there was plenty more to see and do. Hey mom, does your timeshare work in Nice?