One Night in Nice!

Because I am a bargain finder, we took an unusual path to get to Nice from Frankfurt. The cheapest fares ended up being on Scandinavian Airlines (which is a partner of Air Canada...so double bonus, we collected miles 😀 ). The hub is of course in Stockholm. This means that we didn't fly direct from Frankfurt to Nice, but rather flew two hours North to Stockholm, spent an hour and a half in the airport and then flew back three hours south to Nice. It's funny how the cheapest flight actually uses the most fuel...

The flight to Stockholm was fine, minus the fact that I ended up sharing my seat with a rather large man. He was very polite, and I'm sure it was uncomfortable for him as well, but let's just say I'm glad it was only for 2 hours.

Steve has decided we are not returning to Stockholm, because we will never have enough money to afford it 😉 He bought two mediocre sandwiches and we shared a diet coke. After conversion it worked out to be $51 Canadian. I KID YOU NOT! So here's a travel tip, spend the money on the plane to buy lunch if you are ever in the same situation because it WILL be cheaper than what you can get at the airport.

So as I read back over this I think, "Wow, it sounds like this trip didn't start off very well"... but you should know that isn't what I was thinking. I was just so happy to be heading to the south of France, that it didn't even really register as anything negative. That's how much I love it on the French Riviera!

We arrived in Nice... our luggage came off almost first!!!!... and we took a cab to our hotel which was in the old town. The cab was expensive... but I still didn't care.... I was too happy to be by the ocean again!

We checked into our hotel which was basic, 100 Euros a night, and clean. After taking the "we are so happy to be here" photo from our balcony we headed out for a walk.

We headed down the main street towards the ocean, and came across this very cool fountain park (which we are pretty sure wasn't here last time!)

The water came out at varying heights, and then stopped and started periodically. I couldn't figure out a pattern, so just stood on the edge for the photo. We were both enjoying watching the kids playing in the water. My favourite were the little boys who thought it was hilarious to put their bums over the water spraying up and shake it 😀

We continued on our walk until we got to the ocean. It is funny how you can miss an inanimate object like the ocean... but we did!

At this point we were getting hungry. You would think after spending $51 on 2 sandwiches we'd be good for the day... but they weren't that filling 🤷

We decided to see if we could find the place that had the amazing onion tart last time. After winding through the streets we found the place, but they didn't have the onion tart on the menu...so we looked until we found a place that did. First we had a false start and sat at the wrong restaurant!

Here I am at the wrong restaurant... waiting expectantly for my menu...

Travel tip: When you are looking at the menus to choose your restaurant in Nice you must choose carefully where you sit. You can't see a beginning and end to the outside eating spaces, they just all blend together. When we sat down we realized we were in the wrong place because the wrong menu came! So we moved. I felt a bit weird about it, but Steve convinced me to move anyway. We discovered that the way to tell the difference between restaurants was to look at the table umbrellas. Each restaurant has different ones and this will help you determine where the restaurants begin and end. (I just noticed in the photos that the chairs are also different! Didn't see that when we were there...)

Here is Steve at the correct restaurant. We were literally one table away!

Anyway, once we had that sorted we had an okay meal. My onion tart was apparently traditional, but not the way either of us remember it, and my steak was blah. I forgot that when you come from Canada, steak in Europe (or anywhere else other than North America!) is not what you are expecting! We finished off with a lovely dessert...and of course were still happy because we were in France 😀

We continued for our walk after dinner, enjoyed looking at the buildings, the people and all things in between and then headed off to bed.

So we came across these statues which look a bit like Buddhas, or people meditating in Massena Square. There are 7 of them, and they change colour. I looked it up because I was curious of the significance. The seven statues represent the seven continents, and the communication between the different communities. The name of this piece is “Conversation à Nice”

This pretty street led us back to our hotel...

So the next morning we headed out to find breakfast. Right before the beach we came across a boulangerie where we bought two amazingly delicious baguette sandwiches... these ones for less than 8 Euros including a bottle of water! Moral of the story France beats Stockholm in the sandwich department!

We ate them at the beach, which was also lovely, except for the part where Steve sat in gum. 😀

Here he is... so excited to eat our sandwiches, that he doesn't realize he is sitting on someone's gum.

We sorted this out no problem by heading into H&M and buying him some new shorts (yes it was that bad), and then headed to the train station to go to Villefranche-sur-mer!