C'est Nice

Hey, hey, hey!

Sorry, having a fat Albert flashback... or... flash... something. Great, now I've gone and confuzzled myself.

So, last time I left you, I was cleaning fake Cannes sand out of the cuts I had sliced in my feet by standing on sharp sea-creatures. Needless to say, walking was less than super-fun at this point. Fortunately, Anne and I found an English Bookstore--not a very big one, mind you, but it was still very nice--and looked around for a few minutes until the stuffy British proprietrice told us that she hadn't had lunch, and wouldn't we mind coming back in fifteen minutes? It's possible that she overheard me talking myself down from a purchase. Whatevs. I can only carry so many books home with me.

After sharing a crepe avec creme de marrons (a kind of chestnut jam... very tasty) we walked over to the stylish Malmaison, whose blue carpet I find much more compelling than the traditional red (they leave the red carpet from the film festival out year round, and it's pretty unimpressive). The exposition in the gallery was of the artist Avril Armand, who works in found objects--mostly wood, nails... he seems to be particularly fond of clothespins and champagne corks. It was an interesting exhibit, and even more exciting, it was free (yay for free stuff!).

To put the rest of the afternoon in brief: We walked up and down the Boulevard which lines the water a few times, in hopes of trying to find the ferries that run to the Ile Ste Marguerite, where, supposedly, the man in the Iron Mask was kept. The boats also go to the Ile St. Honoré, which had an old monestary that sounded interesting. Alas, we found not the boats, but did see an interesting little exposition on Cyrano de Bergerac, which had a production currently up in Cannes.

Finally, we ended up at the Petanque courts in the center of town--petanque is a french kind of Bocce Ball--and ran into first Meaghan, and then Sabina and Katie, and we hung out until dinner, but not without taking one amazing photo of (from left to right) Meaghan, Katie and Sabina.

Dinner followed, and then we trouped back onto the bus headed back to Nice, and went to bed.

The next day, I woke up to the sound of thunder and lightening a fair ways off, but still pretty loud. It was about 6:20, 6:30 or so. I was lazing around in bed, hoping to go back to sleep, when all of a sudden, KRAAAAK-BOOOM! A bolt of lightning hit the Lycee about ten yards away from the window I was looking gazing out of. It was incredibly loud, incredibly bright, and over in the span of a half-second. It was definitely the closest I've ever been to a lightning strike, and looked a lot like how it's pictured in cartoons: a big, jagged ribbon of light zooming down and exploding like a huge, white July 4th firecracker. It's hard to decide what was more impressive, the noise or the light. Anyway, at that moment I was WIDE awake.

I went to go look for Allison and/or Emily, since our plan that day had been to go to Porquerolles Island, where there were beaches and bike rentals and hiking paths, but not a whole lot else. Needless to say, the trip was postponed for next weekend, and instead, we threw together a last-minute trip to the Medieval coastal town of Antibes. The morning was pretty lazy, and saw, in addition to more Acceuil duty, the indoctrination of several of my co-RAs into a Six Feet Under following.

At Antibes, we visited the Picasso Museum, which is in a castle where he lived and worked for several months. He's got some crazy stuff there, including this happy looking fellow on my left (your right). The afternoon ended up being another oen of those large gaping holes, which was fine... I walked around Antibes for a looooong time, coming to rest finally on a stoop just inside the old city walls, where I managed to write an entire page (front and back, folks!) of fiction.

After this, it was off to Juan les Pins for dinner, where I dined with the RAs and also our bus driver, a crazy French-Italian guy named Jean-Luc Peirani, who didn't seem to mind my atrocious french... or at least, didn't comment.

The students tried to put up a rebellion when we told them we weren't going back to Nice for dinner. It had come to our attention (thanks to our Gossip Queen RA Emily) that nightly trips to the beach had turned into hormonally charged adolescent makeout sessions; suffice it to say, the kids were bummed out about not getting their "beach time" for the day.

Anyway, there's a bit more, but once again, the staff meeting calls.

Sorry folks! Stay tuned for the next heart-racing installation of...

Charlie.