C'est Nice
Friday, July 15, 2005
la plus longue journée
So... yeah. It's been a wild couple of days here. I wrote down the events of the 13th of July, 2005 in a letter, and decided that rather than rehash the fairly long tale, I'd just post the letter. Enjoy.
Hey babe. Coming straight at you from the Côte d'Azur, from beautiful, beachy Nice! It's currently 00h38, early on the morning of Bastille Day. I'm sitting in a classroom here at the
Lycée Masséna (where our program is housed) watching more than a dozen students. I'm here to make sure they don't talk.
It's a bit of a long story. Today was technically supposed to be my day off. For the most part, actually, it was. My friend and Co-RA Anne and I had made make-shift plans to go to Italy for the day. It started off well enough... that is, I didn't oversleep. We had a quick breakfast, hoofed it over to the rail station, and found ourselves in a ridiculously long line to buy our tickets. It turned out that the guy at the info desk had sent us to the Advance Ticket Purchase line, as opposed to the Immediate Departure Purchase line. Cool. Fortunately the train was delayed 15 minutes, which was just enough time to gut us our tickets and fur us to cram ourselves into an absolutely packed train--they had obviously oversold it to an absurd extent--and we started off eastward.
We had orginally planned to go to this little town called Finale Ligure (about two hours away from Nice), but upon learning that the last train back across the border left at 18h30, we decided to stay closer to home. We headed instead for Sanremo, a fairly sizeable city in the Ligure region of Italy, only an hour away from Nice.
The Sanremo train station is set deep inside a mountain... we had to take several moving sidwalks (interestingly, no escalators) to get out to the street. I had read in a guide book that there were some gorgeous mountain villages outside of Sanremo, so Anne and I headed for the bus station and bought tickets for a 13hoo bus to Triora, about an hour and a half outside of Sanremo (recommended both by the guide book and by a station agent at the Sanremo train station, who told us it was both beautiful and his birthplace). It was going to be a little on the tight side time-wise, but, if the buses were more or less on time, we were going to have no problem catching the train back to France.
Unfortunately, the bus had yet to show up by 13h15, and by 13h20, we abandoned the Triora plan, and decided instead on a leisurely lunch and afternoon stroll in Sanremo.
It's a very pretty town, Sanremo... like I said, on the bigger side. It's got this crazy old town/quarter called La Pigna, perched way up on top of a fairly sharp hill. Unlike the old towns in Barcelona and Nice, however, La Pigna is very residential, with hardly any shops or restaurants, which was nice--everywhere else on the Riviera is so jam-packed with touristy crap that I wonder whether there's anything authentic left (but what is authentic, right, Dad?). All the streets in this little old town were graded, houses on top of houses, even built over streets... it was very cool.
Lunch included two of my Italian favorites: gnocchi and prosciutto e melone. I also had some cut of meat that I couldn't recognize, but was still pretty tasty.
Afterwards, we walked around town for a while and ended up back at the bus station, and feeling like we had exhausted Sanremo and all it had to offer, we hopped on a local bus heading westward, back towards France. In my reading, I had noted that there were a few coastal towns between Sanremo and the border which were supposed to be nice (but never Nice... muahahaha!). We stopped at a town called Bordighera, which was very sweet. The boardwalk was much more tasteful than some of the Municipal Mediterranean beaches I've seen. We got gelati (I had some flavor I had never tasted before, but I can't remember what it was called... :(. We ate at this beachside café/bar/gelateria with a gorgeous view of the sea, listening to a radio station that alternated between Italian rap and bad American pop (including the wonderfully hypocritical cover of "Big Yellow Taxi"), a funny choice considering that the only clientele aside from me and Anne were these sixty-year-old Italian ladies, drinking what looked like highly alcoholic smoothies.
Shortly after we left, it began to rain half-heartedly, so we took shelter in another café, where we partook in some limoncello and watched a group of Italian men play this billiards game on a huge pool table without pockets or cuesticks (I'm not sure what it was called).
Anyway, by the time we finished our limoncello, the rain had let up a little, so we started walking again when we ran into another bus (not literally, although the image is amusing) from the same line as before, and, on a bit of a whim, hopped on it, towards the border town of Ventimiglia (literally, 20 miles... why it is so named, I'm not sure), figuring we'd be able to board a train directly to Nice (most French trains terminate in Ventimiglia, and to continue on into Italy, you have to switch to an Italian train). It took a while to get there (lousy Italian-Riviera-rush-hour traffic!) although we still had almost an hour left when we got to the station. We went ahead and bought our tickets back to Nice, hopign to avoid a repeat of the mornings events. We paid up, and then, just to confirm, I asked what time teh train left.
"Dix-neuf heures vignt-deux, oui?" ("7:22, right?)
"Non, dix-huit heures, trente" ("No, 6:30).
So... it turned out that, while we were dilly-dallying in Italy, the French rail workers had gone on strike, and most of the trains going back into France were "Soppresso," or cancelled (includign the one we had planned on taking back). It was only by sheer idiotic luck that we ended up at that station on time (if we had gone to Triora earlier, there would have been no train to Nice from Sanremo). Elated with having been able to get back into France without having to spend the night in Italy, we borded the train and headed back to our beloved Nice.
We arrived back at the Lycée around 8:45; after a quick nap and a change of clothes, Anne and I--who were still on our day off--went for dinner in Nice. Three hours, seven dishes of Indian food and one bottle of Rosé later, Anne and I, full and slightly tipsy, were walking around old Nice, with another bottle of wine in my backpack waiting to be drunk... (I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but the program I'm working for is a dry program: RAs are only allowed to drink on their day off).
Thinking that we probably shouldn't drink another bottle of wine on our own, we invited the two RAs who had their day off the next day (Meaghan and Suzanne) to share it with us. They'd asked us to call after dinner, and let them know where we were going to be (they still had to do check-in at 23hoo), which we did.
Now, before I go on, I should explain a few things:
14 Juillet, 2005
Mon amie,Hey babe. Coming straight at you from the Côte d'Azur, from beautiful, beachy Nice! It's currently 00h38, early on the morning of Bastille Day. I'm sitting in a classroom here at the
Lycée Masséna (where our program is housed) watching more than a dozen students. I'm here to make sure they don't talk.
It's a bit of a long story. Today was technically supposed to be my day off. For the most part, actually, it was. My friend and Co-RA Anne and I had made make-shift plans to go to Italy for the day. It started off well enough... that is, I didn't oversleep. We had a quick breakfast, hoofed it over to the rail station, and found ourselves in a ridiculously long line to buy our tickets. It turned out that the guy at the info desk had sent us to the Advance Ticket Purchase line, as opposed to the Immediate Departure Purchase line. Cool. Fortunately the train was delayed 15 minutes, which was just enough time to gut us our tickets and fur us to cram ourselves into an absolutely packed train--they had obviously oversold it to an absurd extent--and we started off eastward.
We had orginally planned to go to this little town called Finale Ligure (about two hours away from Nice), but upon learning that the last train back across the border left at 18h30, we decided to stay closer to home. We headed instead for Sanremo, a fairly sizeable city in the Ligure region of Italy, only an hour away from Nice.
The Sanremo train station is set deep inside a mountain... we had to take several moving sidwalks (interestingly, no escalators) to get out to the street. I had read in a guide book that there were some gorgeous mountain villages outside of Sanremo, so Anne and I headed for the bus station and bought tickets for a 13hoo bus to Triora, about an hour and a half outside of Sanremo (recommended both by the guide book and by a station agent at the Sanremo train station, who told us it was both beautiful and his birthplace). It was going to be a little on the tight side time-wise, but, if the buses were more or less on time, we were going to have no problem catching the train back to France.
Unfortunately, the bus had yet to show up by 13h15, and by 13h20, we abandoned the Triora plan, and decided instead on a leisurely lunch and afternoon stroll in Sanremo.
It's a very pretty town, Sanremo... like I said, on the bigger side. It's got this crazy old town/quarter called La Pigna, perched way up on top of a fairly sharp hill. Unlike the old towns in Barcelona and Nice, however, La Pigna is very residential, with hardly any shops or restaurants, which was nice--everywhere else on the Riviera is so jam-packed with touristy crap that I wonder whether there's anything authentic left (but what is authentic, right, Dad?). All the streets in this little old town were graded, houses on top of houses, even built over streets... it was very cool.
Lunch included two of my Italian favorites: gnocchi and prosciutto e melone. I also had some cut of meat that I couldn't recognize, but was still pretty tasty.
Afterwards, we walked around town for a while and ended up back at the bus station, and feeling like we had exhausted Sanremo and all it had to offer, we hopped on a local bus heading westward, back towards France. In my reading, I had noted that there were a few coastal towns between Sanremo and the border which were supposed to be nice (but never Nice... muahahaha!). We stopped at a town called Bordighera, which was very sweet. The boardwalk was much more tasteful than some of the Municipal Mediterranean beaches I've seen. We got gelati (I had some flavor I had never tasted before, but I can't remember what it was called... :(. We ate at this beachside café/bar/gelateria with a gorgeous view of the sea, listening to a radio station that alternated between Italian rap and bad American pop (including the wonderfully hypocritical cover of "Big Yellow Taxi"), a funny choice considering that the only clientele aside from me and Anne were these sixty-year-old Italian ladies, drinking what looked like highly alcoholic smoothies.
Shortly after we left, it began to rain half-heartedly, so we took shelter in another café, where we partook in some limoncello and watched a group of Italian men play this billiards game on a huge pool table without pockets or cuesticks (I'm not sure what it was called).
Anyway, by the time we finished our limoncello, the rain had let up a little, so we started walking again when we ran into another bus (not literally, although the image is amusing) from the same line as before, and, on a bit of a whim, hopped on it, towards the border town of Ventimiglia (literally, 20 miles... why it is so named, I'm not sure), figuring we'd be able to board a train directly to Nice (most French trains terminate in Ventimiglia, and to continue on into Italy, you have to switch to an Italian train). It took a while to get there (lousy Italian-Riviera-rush-hour traffic!) although we still had almost an hour left when we got to the station. We went ahead and bought our tickets back to Nice, hopign to avoid a repeat of the mornings events. We paid up, and then, just to confirm, I asked what time teh train left.
"Dix-neuf heures vignt-deux, oui?" ("7:22, right?)
"Non, dix-huit heures, trente" ("No, 6:30).
So... it turned out that, while we were dilly-dallying in Italy, the French rail workers had gone on strike, and most of the trains going back into France were "Soppresso," or cancelled (includign the one we had planned on taking back). It was only by sheer idiotic luck that we ended up at that station on time (if we had gone to Triora earlier, there would have been no train to Nice from Sanremo). Elated with having been able to get back into France without having to spend the night in Italy, we borded the train and headed back to our beloved Nice.
We arrived back at the Lycée around 8:45; after a quick nap and a change of clothes, Anne and I--who were still on our day off--went for dinner in Nice. Three hours, seven dishes of Indian food and one bottle of Rosé later, Anne and I, full and slightly tipsy, were walking around old Nice, with another bottle of wine in my backpack waiting to be drunk... (I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but the program I'm working for is a dry program: RAs are only allowed to drink on their day off).
Thinking that we probably shouldn't drink another bottle of wine on our own, we invited the two RAs who had their day off the next day (Meaghan and Suzanne) to share it with us. They'd asked us to call after dinner, and let them know where we were going to be (they still had to do check-in at 23hoo), which we did.
Now, before I go on, I should explain a few things:
- One of the kids had purchased a hookah here in Nice, and he and a whole bunch of kids (somewhere between 20 and 30) had been going nightly to the beach and smoking it (with tobacco, totally legal). It had taken us a while to figure out a policy on it, since we didn't prohibit cigarette smoking outside the Lycée, and hookah-ing is basically the same thing; however, once we found out that the kid who owned the hookah had been charging other kids to use it (9€ for the whole summer), we shut it down and told them that it was no longer allowed. This was a fairly big disappointment for them, since the hookah parties invariably devolved (or evolved, depending on your perspective) into makeout orgies. To put it into context: The hookah had been banned on Tuesday night, my day off was Wednesday, and today, Bastille Day, is Thursday.
- Anne had mentioned earlier that day that one of her residents--a girl who manages to be annoying, awkward, timid and a social climber all at the same time--had come to Anne in tears the day before, because a group of kids she wanted to hang out with had ditched her at the Lycée. But apparently, in addition to the aforementioned attributes, this girl had a bitter, vengeful streak a mile long, because she began rattling off a list of names of people she knew were drinking (one of the biggest rules on the program, along with no drugs, is no booze) and what bar they were hanging out at. Anyway, Anne was sayign she was grateful not to have to be at our daily staff meeting to discuss the girl's allegations.
Here's how it went down:
- Two RAs were chosen to go around and check a bunch of bars for students who were drinking. At the very first one, they found four students, all with drinks in front of them. These kids flipped out--it apparently had been the first drink of the summer for a few of them--and started spilling about how there were several more kids at another bar, Checkpoint, and they had been drinking for weeks (not continuously, I hope...).
- With the operating philosophy that we couldn't bust these students without at least checking out Checkpoint, we sent two more RAs (Emily and Sabina) and one senior staff member (Katie) to investigate. Sabina waited outside while Emily and Katie went downstairs, where they saw many more kids than they had expected. Using a classic pincer movement, with Katie discreetly walking around the dance floor to the back of the room, they found all the students and told them to get outside. Sabina caught them as they headed out the door, and by the time Katie and Emily had emerged from the bar, thirty-four of our students had exited (almost half the program). Sabina lined them up and they were marched back to the Lycée, and put into classrooms, while the staff tried to figure out what the hell we were going to do.
So, by the time Anne and I called (about 23h30) things were still pretty nuts. Suffice it to say, Meaghan and Suzanne weren't going to be coming out to share the bottle of wine. Anne and I decided to return to the Lycée to help out (by this point, we had sobered up, and the prospect of drinking while all our students were awaiting punishment for drinking didn't sit too well).
And that pretty much brings me back to the beginning of the letter, sitting, in a classroom watching over the kids who had been caught, making sure they didn't talk while we figured out the next steps. Although we were within our rights to send some kids home (according to the progam rules), we were instructed by the home office of the company to keep everyone there (among several opinions held by the RAs is the thought that a smaller group would probably have incurred more punishment). They're all on probation, meaning we called their parents and they will get sent home if they break any more rules, but, for reasons beyond our understanding, but more importantly, beyond our control, no one is getting so much as an early curfew. (That's actually not true: three of my residents, who missed the mandatory Olympics competition earlier that day, are serving early curfew tonight.)
Anyway, that's the end of my story. It's taken a few days to write (it's Friday now). I'm in the Catedral Rosetti in the center of Old Nice, listening to a musical rehearsal of what sounds like bad wedding music. I'm waiting for my laundry to dry at the Laverie up the street. It's probably done, so I should go. I love you and miss you!
Charlie.
PS. They're currently murdering "O, Happy Day!" *Shudder*.
posted by Charlie Beckerman # 5:52 PM 
Archives
June 2005 July 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006
