London Spring 2011: The French Riviera

This weekend Shayna and I went to visit our AKPsi friends Alexa, Marissa and Jesse in Southern France on the Cote d’Azur (Blue Coast). Meagan and Chelsea went to Germany for the weekend, but we all had flights out of Gatwick Airport at 7am on Thursday morning. Instead of going to sleep early we decided to just go out to Imperial College and then pulled an all nighter. Although we had fun, it was a bad decision overall as we were all miserable in the airport as well as the plane. Once we arrived in Nice airport, Shayna and I took a bus and a train to Antibes, the town in which Marissa and Alexa live. To get to their apartment, it is quite a trek since it is about a mile walk, completely uphill. Although it is a long walk to get anywhere, it is absolutely beautiful where they live. They have a 2 bedroom apartment on the first floor of a house where their landlord lives. However the landlord was not there for the weekend since he was in Paris, so we had everything to ourselves. We also took care of the landlords dog Oliver which is a tiny white dog. There are palm trees and orange tile roofs everywhere. Since the house is on the top of a hill, you can see the ocean and mountains easily.

After taking a nap for a while, we met up with Alexa and Marissa’s friend Max who goes to their school and also conveniently also has a car. We all drove with Max to Cannes (Yep, the place they have the film festival) on Friday night and saw the city and went to a club for about an hour or two.

We spent the entire day on Saturday in the city of Nice, which is absolutely beautiful. The beach has clear blue water, there are mountains and cliffs as far as the eye can see and the weather was perfect. It was great to walk around with a t-shirt in 60-degree weather when I haven’t seen the sunshine in London for weeks and there is 18 inches of snow in NYC. It was also fun to see Alexa get soaked by a wave, which I happened to catch on video. We spent about an hour on the beach enjoying the weather and we climbed up to the top of a fort like structure to get a great view of the city and to watch the sun set. We then walked around, went to dinner and took the train back to Antibes. Nice is an absolutely beautiful city and I guess that’s why it is named “nice”.

On Saturday the weather did no cooperate as well as it did on Friday. I think I brought the London weather as it was in the 40’s and it down-poured almost all day. We ate lunch at the most American place you can possibly go on the French Riviera, a restaurant named “Buffalo Grill”. Because my friends and I are very immature we all decided to wear the chief paper hats that children at the restaurant wear. We later ended up going to Monte Carlo in Monaco where it was raining way to hard to do much. On arrival in Monaco we decided to jump on a bus and see where it took us, which happened to be an oceanography museum. We took the train back to Nice and we missed out on seeing a lot of Monaco because of the terrible weather. I also didn’t take any photos except in the museum because I did not want to ruin my camera. If you want to see what Monaco looks like, google it. After the train got back to Nice we had to walk about a half hour to get to the bus while it was raining really hard and we got completely soaked.

While we were on the bus we decided that we were going to stay in on Saturday night because it was raining way too hard to do anything else. We then came up with the brilliant idea to have a house party since the landlord was in Paris. After getting off the bus we had to walk really fast to get to the supermarket as fast as possible since it was 8:20pm and it closed at 8:30pm. We arrived there with about three minutes to spare and we ran through the supermarket grabbing everything we needed for a house party including pizza, chips, and drinks. Saturday night was one of the most fun nights I had in a long time which ended with everyone jumping into the freezing cold pool at 3am….and we didn’t get sick or come down with hyperthermia (yet).

This morning we headed to the airport by bus to catch our flight back to London. Apparently my backpack counted as a bag for easyJet and I had to pay 35 euros to check in my very small duffel bag. I didn’t have to pay for the flight over so I questioned the ticket lady about the easyJet policy, and she refused to answer my question. I tried to fit everything in my one bag to avoid the charge, but it was impossible and she didn’t give me the chance to try. The ticket agent was the rudest, bitchiest woman I have ever met in my life and I was trying to keep my cool. Anyone who is friends with me knows that I am one of the nicest guys you can meet, I rarely get mad at people and I never get pissed off….today it happened though. Once I finally decided to pay the ridiculous charge I gave the woman my British passport and she commented, “Oh the British are almost as bad as the Americans these days”. That was one of the rudest things that someone has ever said to me and it took everything for me not to just smack her and get arrested. Throughout the trip I realized that the stereotype is pretty true, French people are very rude to tourists.

Despite how the trip ended, France is a beautiful country and it was great to see my friends and enjoy the nice weather on Friday.

Interesting things about France:

1) They don’t pick up after their dogs, gross.

2) The word for shredded is “rápé"….yep I want some rape cheese

3) Wine is cheaper than both water and Coke, not kidding.

4) Their bread really is the best bread in the world.

5) Yep, they are very rude to tourists.

Anyway current country count is at 6, putting me closer to my goal of 10.

---Current Country Count---

1) England

2) Wales

3) Belgium

4) Netherlands

5) France

6) Monaco

PS- If they are unfortunate enough to read this, special thanks to Marissa and Alexa for having us over this weekend. Also if you are a guy with the initials of MC, screw you.

PPS- I don't know why this blog always changes the font size...It automatically does it.

-Rees