France-ing with Myself (and others. But, you know, puns)

So yes, it’s been a while since my last blog post. In my defence, I’ve totally been working on it! In fact, I’ve been working on TWO blog posts, so don’t judge me, internet.

That said, I’m totally going to start posting more often to avoid the mammoth post that I assume I am about to write.

Okay, so France! The land of cheese, and striped clothing, and baguettes, and smoking, and tiny, tiny dogs EVERYWHERE. I legitimately thought most of these were exaggerations or stereotypes, but it turns out that noooooope. Especially not the tiny dogs thing – I saw so many tiny dogs in fancy clothing stores that I started to wonder if the French had secretly worked out how to create doggie-cashiers (or cashuahuas) and just didn’t tell anybody. And piano accordians! When I was living in the old town in Nice, there was an accordianist who would play to the patrons of the bar under my window every night. Does it get more French than that? Nope. Am I a little bit sick of hearing Hello Dolly and Que Sera Sera? Surprisingly not. But like, maybe a little break from both of those songs couldn’t hurt. Just for a little while.

I spent a month in Nice, studying French with the Alliance Française, which was heaps of fun, despite an awkward experience that involved assuming “preservative” in French was “preservatif” (it’s not, for those of you playing at home. ‘Preservatif’ means ‘condom’, although if anything I think condoms are meant to be STOPPING you from preserving anything, but whatever. Anyway, the sentence was about not wanting to eat preservatives in food, so it still works.Pretty much. Nobody wants condoms in their food.).

But the great thing about living in the French Riviera is that, no matter where you live, all the other little towns along the coast are just a skip, jump, and 1.50 euro bus away, so I actually saw a lot more than just Nice. So, voilà! The Paige Mulholland Guide to the French Riviera:

Nice
Nice is beautiful, and has totally awe-inspiring views of the port and the city if you head down the the Colline du Chateau. And if you’re willing to embrace the possibility that you may never have use of your legs again after climbing EIGHTY BILLION STEPS.

It also has beautiful beaches, although they’re pebble beaches. Pebble beaches have their plusses, including not getting all sandy after your trip to the beach and never being blinded by sand as it’s disturbed by children or rambunctious youths running past, but they also have their minuses, including sitting up with rock marks all over your legs after lying on the beach for an hour, and, you know, the INABILITY TO WALK AS ROCKS MAKE TINY HOMES ON THE INSIDE OF YOUR FEET. And the Nice beach (as well as, I think, all the beaches along the riviera) are topless, too, if that’s your kinda thing. Warning, though, 99% of the topless people on topless beaches are precisely the people you don’t want to see topless. But hey, you still have like a 0.00001% chance of happening upon a topless celebrity or something, so it might be worth it.

Let’s be honest, though, Nice is a tourist city. And while this is great if you don’t speak the language or want to take a tour or see a show, it does mean that it’s super duper expensive. But you know what’s not expensive in Nice due to competition so excessive I’m pretty sure there’s at least one of these stores for each citizen? Ice cream. Seriously, especially in the old town, every second store is a “glacerie”, offering flavours ranging from Nutella (of course – it’s Europe) to Basil and Tomato (… a little less obvious. But like, I’m sure it’s a valid and completely un-gross flavour. Probs). And if you decide that you can’t live on icecream alone (this is a poor decision, but in true journalistic style I will give you unbiased information even if I think you’re wrong) then there’s a fab Spanish bar called La Sansa’s, with easily the most affordable drinks I found in Nice. And food. Probably. Not gonna lie, I was more focused on the 3.50 euro margaritas than the food. But I feel like there was food.

Cannes
I feel like all anybody really knows about Cannes is that one month a year there are a bunch of celebrities there, but there are other things in Cannes too! There’s a beach with a crazy little bridgy thing that you can balance-walk across through the water to get to a little rock island (it was pretty much just me and a bunch of small children who wanted to do it because i think all the fuzzy mossy crap on the bridge put the adults off, but it was totally the funnest thing on that beach so they missed out), there’s an old town with more spectacular views (and more stairs and more Paige-complaints and more blisters, but whatever), and there’s a beautiful fresh market where not only do most of the vendors not speak English (this wasn’t a problem because we were speaking French) but they also don’t speak French (this WAS a problem, because we were speaking French.). They said they spoke Arabic, but a girl in my group then began to speak fluent Arabic to them and they didn’t understand. So I don’t know what they spoke. We might have been better off with Cashuahuas.

My favourite thing that happened in Cannes was using the produce we eventually managed to buy from the aforementioned market (and, okay, some sneaky biscuits and 2 euro wine from a supermarket) to have a picnic in the park, and running into a little girl from Manchester who, apparently, had been begging her parents for a picnic for her ENTIRE holiday. So of course, we invited her to join our group, which consisted of my Australian self, Medena from Canada, Samara from Mexico and Alessia from London. Now this little girl, of course, had no trouble understanding Alessia as a fellow Brit, or Medena, because her accent sounds like a Disney Princess or something, but with mine and Samara’s we may as well have been speaking French to her. So there was a lot of “How old are you?” “….” “Paige is trying to ask how old you are, sweetie” “Oh! I’m four.” going on. On the plus side, worrying about the comprehensibility of my English was a nice break from worrying about the comprehensibility of my French.

Villefranche-sur-Mer
Villefranche was actually my favourite place on the French Riviera, despite knowing nothing about it before actually arriving there. In addition to, as is a common theme in this part of France, having a beautiful and breathtaking (in that I couldn’t breathe after CLIMBING ALL THE STAIRS), old town and views of the sea, the beach here was incredible. Sandy, with clear, calm blue water that gets deep so quickly that ten steps into the sea I couldn’t touch the bottom even if I dived. But also probably you shouldn’t dive, because a friend of mine got stung by a jellyfish. Being from, you know, a normal country, she was like “Oh, that stings. Bummer. I’ll just sit in the sun for a while”, but being from Australia, my response was “Oh, do you think it’s a deadly jellyfish? They have those, you know. You might die”. Which, you know, probably wasn’t the best thing to say. So in the end Alessia had to take her and explain to the cashier at the local kiosk that Medena “had a problem with a jellyfish” (whatever, guys, we might have an ‘Advanced’ level of French according to our certificates, but “stung” isn’t a word that you learn that often. Neither is “jellyfish” actually, but we googled that.)

St Paul de Vence
Super duper pretty! I just realised this post is exploding to lengths out of all control, but luckily, St Paul de Vence is simple – gorgeous views of mountains and valleys, and a charming little town with beautiful art galleries and artists everywhere (art is to St Paul de Vence as ice cream is to Nice. Except it’s not that cheap). That said, probably don’t dedicate a whole day to it, which we tried to do. Otherwise you’ll end up impulse buying a bunch of expensive biscuits like this:

Eze
Eze is not coastal, but I feel like it’s still part of the Riviera, because you could still SEE the ocean, it was just that to actually get to the ocean you would have had to jump off the jagged mountain. And you would probably die. But anyway, Eze! Possibly even MORE stairs than the other places, but still very nice. We did a tour of the Franongard factory (for those who don’t know, this is a super fancy cosmetics/perfume brand), and they let us smell all their base scents, which are surprisingly hard to identify when you’re smelling one after the other really fast, because your nose kind of just freaks out and goes all, “I DONT KNOW IF THIS IS PASSIONFRUIT OR STRAWBERRY, BRAIN, PLEASE STOP MAKING ME SMELL THINGS”. Eze also has a medieval fortress and an old town, and a beautiful botanic garden although, word to the wise, “botanic gardens” in France are pretty much just cacti, because for the French it doesn’t GET more exotic than that. Oh but there are little chaise-lounges where you can sit at the top of the cliff in the gardens and enjoy a spectacular view of the cacti/French riviera bay.

Monaco
The fact that you can board a metro bus for an hour, pay 1.50 euro, not show your passport and end up in another country is mindblowing for me. I mean, I think Monaco is technically a principality and maybe not a country, but still. And, as you get off the bus, you definitely feel like you’re in another country – suddenly the pedestrian lights make sounds like in Australia, the streets aren’t all called “Victor Hugo” or “Notre Dame”, and, get excited, THERE ARE FEWER STAIRS! Like, still lots to get to the palace and stuff, but fewer. Instead, they have public elevators set into pretty much every hilly area, and they have little shopping centres set into some of the mountains, so when you get out of the elevator you’re sure you’ve accidentally entered some super villain secret headquarters, but then you turn the corner and see a supermarket. We also went to the zoo (which was like 60% Australian animals, weirdly. But still, flying across the world just to see more kangaroos is still good fun. And there were also giant bunnies!), the royal palace, which I actually thoroughly recommend, and the botanical garden, which is meant to be one of the most beautiful in the world, but, I admit, still just looked to me like a bunch of cacti.

Antibes:
Ah, Antibes. In a series of expensive, touristy towns, Antibes is like an Australian beach – cheap, sandy, with toilets that are free to use, albeit totally disgusting (who knew France still used squat toilets?). It was nice to be at a beach that was simply that – a beach, with no pretension, exclusive areas or postcard stores in sight. Also the fact that Antibes is a cove (or something similar, anyway. Geography was never my strong point, you can ask my Year 12 teacher), means the water is beautiful, clear and calm.

Toulouse:
Okay so technically this isn’t on the French Riviera and you can’t get here on a 1.50 euro bus, but putting it here made more sense than putting it in my next post, which will be about Spain. I flew to Toulouse, and, after getting to my hostel and finding nobody around to talk to, I was feeling a little lonely, which, as I’m sure many solo travellers would agree, can pretty easily turn to homesickness. Luckily, then came my knights in shining armour, bearing not only scintillating conversation, but free dinner! Well, free bread, cheese, wine and meat, which is totally a legitimate dinner if you are in France. I met Mark, Dan, Danielle and Leon, and we somehow ended up at a hole-in-the-wall jazz club that, although I had to sign some form that may or may not have sold me into slavery/meant that I have to eventually give up a kidney or something, but then I got 1.50 euro wine! Worth it. Plus there was a crazy lady who kept trying to take sips of people’s drinks, and who eventually kissed a member of our party who shall not be named (Mark) on the head! I’m hoping he gets some kind of crazy lady superpowers like if you get bitten by a radioactive spider, but nothing of that nature has happened yet, as far as I know. Anyway, the next three days included museums built in converted monasteries, failed attempts to go to garden music festivals (it was RAINING, guys. And the hostel was all warm and cosy), and emergency handbag shopping trips after mine tragically fell victim to a horrid zip incident, and many a good chat about culture, travel and Daniel’s life on his little farm in the south of France, which, on a side note, sounds like the most freaking pleasant thing to ever exist. Ever.

So that was France! I promise the posts will be shorter from now on. I’m currently on a bus from Madrid to Barcelona, which is an insanely beautiful drive, but, admittedly, my butt is definitely starting to feel the 8-hour drive. But more about that next time!