March 25, 2015
Relaxing Not: Nice is Nice.
The hostel here in Nice is nice. Could say I am sitting nice in Nice except for the weather; it isn't nice, not today and it's been grey for the past few days. Though even if it had been Nice weather, clear blue sky, uplifting, instead of gloom, I wouldn't have known. The hostel common rooms are a windowless cavern and I was inside the first day or so putting notes and memories, thought and photos into journal.
In between time I've washed my duds and been out for a walk on that rare occasion that the sun did appear.
Then this morning when I'd finish the buffet breakfast and had nothing much on for the day and was reading over journal pages, picking up flaws, a young lady come in asking is there anyone here for the free City Walking Tour. Oh yes, me!
This was her first tour and I didn't expect much, but learn that she has written a city-guide for Nice, so isn't exactly what you'd call un-expert. And English not her first language-being Polish but speaking with an elegant French accent-she stalled occasionally to find the English word. She originally come to Nice on holiday, liked the place so much, she decided to quit her job in Poland and move here.
Our entourage of five from the hostel door along wet street pavement, turns a corner and stalls across from a grand art deco period bank building taking up an entire block. It was here in 1965 one of the biggest bank robberies in French history took place, she explains. Expertly carried out by one man; a photographer, who spend months beforehand working a way through the city's sewers to find his way into the bank's basement and bank vault. Getting away with a large some, he taunted police investigators with a message daubed on the vaults wall: No Violence. Apart from that he left nothing to lead them to him, so meticulous had he cleaned after him. He remained at liberty for over a year until an anonymous phone call tipped off police. Then during his trail he made a dramatic breakout from the court house and escaped.
Our guide had suggested to the Korean girl on the tour she wear a warm jacket instead of just a summer jersey. And I had thought while we waited for everybody in reception, to return upstairs to my room and don socks with my sandals. However while we walked further and I tailed off marvelling up at the banks architecture, I trod in a big puddle. Well I'd just on sandals and am glad, I didn't put the socks on after all.
She leads us across the checquered pavement flagged oval with an exhilarating park of spurting water and avenue leading off, explaining the river ran along here until covered over. Later on a wall inside a long archway in the old town we were to see the city in various eras of it's long history. It was the Greeks that first settled here. Then the Romans came. Then the Turks invaded, but according to legend were promptly repelled when a local washerwoman dropped her drawers and they ran off in fright. But the city derives much from English aristocrats that came here from the eighteenth century onwards, believing in the health benefits of clear skies and sunshine. They gave money to locals to build a promenade along the beachfront, today called Les Promenade Des Anglais. Queen Victoria loved Nice and took up half Hotel Regina with her entourage whenever she visited. In the nineteen-twenties it was American Tycoons that displaced the English.
And of coarse Nice and the South of France has been a place were artist came because of clear sky showing up exuberant colours.
We finish are tour in Garibaldi square, by a monument to the man facing Turin. The Italian came too at the time of Italian unification in 1861.
Well I've ended up remaining in Nice another day when at last, the sun shone and I got out with the camera. And this evening as I write, I've been multitasking: one hand is on the computer keypad, while the other is writing notes.
It is nice in Nice and here in this hostel as it is the only hostel I've stayed in that has a grand piano in the corner. And I don't know how they know, but travellers that really know how to play gravitate here and I listen to soothing live music as I do this.
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