Day 15-16: Nice, France and Monte Carlo, Monaco
from Photographs of Europe, May-June 2002 by Tim Darling
(Click on the photos..)
Saturday, June 1 - Nice, France
I stayed with my aunt and uncle and two cousins in their house a few miles outside of
Nice. I walked around the beach there in the morning before meeting them. It wasn't that spectacular.
Clearly the best spots in that part of France are the smaller towns in the hills and the less
famous parts of the coast. France's smaller towns are its best.
The rest of the day I spent watching some of the World Cup like a true European and
visiting a couple smaller towns nearby with them. Their house is very nice. It sits on the
side of a steep hill looking down at the Mediterranean in the distance.
We ate dinner at a restaurant called Le Dragoniére. (The dragon's lair?
Apparently adding '-iére' to the end of a word in Italian turns a noun into the container of itself, such as: Zucchero -> zuccheriera; sugar -> sugar bowl)
When she put down my salad, the waitress also put
down two half carafe-sized bottles on the table with white and red liquids. Having been
raised in the US, I naturally assumed they were oil and vinegar and poured them on my
salad to the astonished looks of everyone else who of course knew they were red and
white wine. It wasn't bad though, I might do it again.
Sunday, June 2 - Monte Carlo, Monaco
We went up to Monaco and Monte Carlo before I had to leave by another night train to
Pisa. My ticket said I would get to Pisa at the convenient hour of 3 AM.
Monte Carlo is about half of Monaco which is of course a country the size of a small city
surrounded by France and the Mediterranean a few miles from Italy.
The Monte Carlo Gran Prix (a car race they have through some streets in the city) had
taken place a week earlier but some of the steel railings, advertisements, stands, and tire
marks were still there. Apparently these things put the drivers of Monaco in a mood to
forget that the race had in fact ended.
While sitting in a café outside the Monte Carlo casino, I watched a Ferrari pull out of a
nearby parking space.
Day 17-18: Pisa, Florence, and Siena, Italy
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All text and pictures copyright © 2002 Tim Darling.
