Trip to Nice

France was very fun. Nice is a pretty small town with a cute city center. We spent each day at the conference in this building called the Acropolis. In the evenings we went out to eat and walk around. Often we were at restaurants until after midnight, and they didn't care. A lot of restaurants didn't even open until 7pm. They kind of expected you to just sit and eat and talk for hours. I had a lot of pizza, which Larisa teases me about. They were kind of thin crispy crusted personal pizzas. Nice is near Italy, so maybe that had something to do with it.

Nice had a laid back feel to it. I enjoyed seeing the narrow alleys with tall buildings on each side and nice balconies. People were often playing music in the streets outside the restaurants (and then approaching you for money when they finished).

I shared a hotel room with Haim. The hotel wasn't anything special but still cost a fortune (over $200 per night). They made us jump through hoops trying to get an internet connection. Haim thinks that the in-room connections don't really exist but they just say they have them to sell more rooms. We ended up paying for wireless. On Wednesday we had the afternoon off, so Haim and I swam in the Mediterranean. The water wasn't too cold, and the waves were pretty big, but the shore was made of rocks that were hard on your feet (about the size of golf balls).

On my last day I finally decided to go to Monaco. I didn't know what it was before this trip. It's a small country (principality) in France. Monte Carlo is part of Monaco, which I had heard of. I went there for a couple of hours. It was only a 15 minute train ride away and was about as close to my hotel as the airport was. Monaco is so small that I like to compare it to Disneyland. The makes Monte Carlo like Tomorrow Land.

Monaco was very luxurious. Fancy yachts, cars, and hotels. The city is sort of vertical. It is build on cliffs next to the ocean. I hiked up to the castle, but I didn't get over to the Monte Carlo casino. However, I couldn't help but do a monte-carlo simulation while there to calculate the bias of a 1 Euro coin I was carrying. Amazingly, I got 5 heads out of 10. It's more fair there than I thought. (FYI, the chance of that is about 1/4.)

I also was in London on the way there. I trekked around town a map, a list of places to visit, and 50 pounds. I saw Buckingham palace, Trafalgar Square, and Piccadilly Circus. I rode the tour buses, and visited the National Gallery (Italian paintings) and the British Museum (the Rosetta Stone and most of the Parthenon it seemed).

London was nice, especially since I could understand the language. When I traveled back through London it happened to be during their discovery of planned terrorist attacks (car bombs), so there was some major security in the airport.

Here is the email I sent home my first day in France:


"I got to the hotel at 12:30pm last night. Since I didn't sleep much at all on the plane the night before (about 2.5 hours) or at Sarah's parents' house the night before, I was totally exhausted. The bus driver here in Nice told me that I should get off at the last stop. When we got there at about 12pm I asked him if he knew where my hotel was and he pointed down the street to this big building. It turned out that that wasn't my hotel. It was some building without any lights on. I wandered around the streets for a while to ask for help or look for a street name that I could find on my map. The streets were amazingly quite; no one was out. Finally someone gave me good directions and I walked over a mile to the hotel. So, I was lucky and got to explore Nice on my first night here. I slept in a bit this morning.

"Oh, and my luggage didn't make it yet. It's still in London, but they say they will deliver it to my hotel this evening. I stink from wearing the same clothes for three days.

"So far, the French people I've talked to have been quite nice and helpful, except for the bus driver. I usually start a conversation with: Bonjour, parle vu anglis? Good, how do I get to...

"London was fun, but very expensive. Just riding the train into London cost $15. I had to ride the express train back to the airport to save 10 minutes, and that cost twice as much. I spent about a hundred dollars (50 pounds) in London. Thanks for the gift Mom. I could have saved a lot of money here and there if I knew how to get around and what I was doing, but I ended up wasting money on transportation here and there. Oh, and I did a ton of walking. At first I decided to walk to several places to get a better look. I walked to Buckingham Palace and Green park (I thought I was at Hyde park), then over to Piccadilly Circus. That was a happening place. There was an outdoor concert going on. Then I rode the tour bus all around the city.