Nice, Côte d'Azur

Maybe the sun will stay here a while. The quad blooms with it, with grass and daisies and frisbees.

This Summer I will visit Lyon. Perhaps Lyon will be like Nice. Nice is the first city I visited unsupervised. It is so beautiful there, with its narrow alley-streets and palm trees. I was homesick there, because it reminded me so much of San Diego. I had not realized how much I missed cacti until our train roared past the shore and I saw them, standing lone and proud, among poorer grasses.

Nice really is not much like California, besides the climate. The people are different, and the sand is different. The beaches are made of rocks that hurt when you stretch over them. But the air is sweet and fine and salty, and the rocks slowly arrange themselves to the curve of your body the longer you lay there. Soon you are as one of them- a big, fleshy stone who has created its own hollow.


We rented an AirBnb- my first- up a goodly hill not far from the center of town. It was maybe ten minutes' walk from Place Garibaldi. It was funny to me that an Italian national would have his own square in a French city. But it was not that funny and maybe I was trying to show off my learning.

We walked twenty miles a day, to the beach, to Matisse Museum, to the market to buy fresh figs and tomatoes to eat with basil grown en plein air. C'est magnifique, mademoiselle! Regardez!

Nice is the closest I have been to Italy, and Hannah dreamed of Florence as we drank fine Italian red wine with dinner. Perhaps I will go to Florence this Summer too. I have wanted to go after reading The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie, and hearing him speak about it.

San Diego nights are violet, Strasbourg nights are blue, and Prague nights are the blackest of black. But in Nice, the nights are golden. Warm, molten, sensuous. The waiters were better educated than doctors. One Signor Luca spoke French, English, Spanish, and Italian. He spoke the last with our new friend, whom we met while stuck in the castle, as he brought us our aperitifs, our arrabiata, and our limoncellos. Their voices danced, lilting like an Irish brogue, but smooth like a Colombian song.

I bought some soca to eat on the train back to Strasbourg.

We missed that train, so I ate it for lunch instead, inhaling the cracked pepper smell and wiping the oil off my fingers with a napkin. (soca is a chickpea pancake sold in Nice).

Anyways, we took the night train back.

Kitsch is in

The Lennon Wall is not hard to find, but we were confused by Czech street signs and  mulled wine. We overheard a group of Italians say that the Wall was just past the French Embassy. We agreed to look for it, and after finding it waiting stolidly for us, disagreed which direction to take from there.

Eventually we remembered that Prague has city-wide WiFi (although I only recall it working in certain areas). Anyways, we had a nice walk and we were not concerned that we were lost. And we realized that there's a sense of satisfaction in tracing a path with your finger on a map, or marking the whole thing up with pencil and imbuing that crinkled document with the scent of a coffee shop.

The light was nearly gone by the time we got there. At dusk, there were not so many tourists. I remember that we crossed a bridge with a silent, white-and-gray cat whose agate eyes followed us. There were locks clustered thickly all up and down the poles- paying respect to Paris, but in a fashion that is infinitely more practical. There was no danger of sagging wire here.

We were alone when we first approached the wall. The Lennon Wall is not very tall, and if not for the graffiti, would be quite unremarkable. The original portrait of John Lennon has long been lost beneath layers of paint and ink. I really did think it would be bigger. I also thought it was just a wall by itself; I did not think it would be attached to anything. In other words, I did not expect it to be functional as an actual wall.

It was funny. Not beautiful, not even a good symbol of protest anymore. It was to fight the coming of kitsch, but in its acquisition of status as a tourist destination, it has became an instrument of Kitsch. The Wall was supposed to be a canvas for the disillusioned and politically conscious youth to splatter their passionate outrage. It was supposed to be their space to decry the excess of the government, of the West, of wealth, of human conceptions of morality and justice.

My eyes traced a lopsided heart. "Marissa and Alex!! August 2015".

But, as Kundera said: "kitsch is an integral part of the human condition". Can we help our own inability to live in the extreme climate of awareness? Can we be held responsible for refusing to leave the warmth of illusion, the safe circle of indifference? Perhaps not.

We heard later that a group of protesters ("damned hippies," exclaimed a red-faced gentleman, throwing his scarf indignantly over his plump shoulder) painted over the messages and pictures because they were kitsch. Disgusted at the Wall's new role as a pawn of the tourism sector and loss of symbolic revolution, they tried to return it to its previous condition- a blank wall and a canvas no longer.

That obviously failed.

A group of American students came, armed with stencils and spray paint. They left behind an image of Richard Nixon, and an image of what looked like a school mascot. In fact, it was some feline animal that looked like every wildcat mascot I've ever seen.



We returned the next day after breakfast. It was a good time to go, although there were more people. There was even a segway tour (which, by the way, are everywhere). Why walk when you don't have to? Hannah has a horror of segways. I turned my face to the sunshine and laughed at her grimaces, listening to the man singing and accompanying himself on the guitar.

No need for greed or hunger
a brotherhood of man...

I wondered if he had children. I threw a few koruna in that man's guitar case and we left quietly for Malá Strana.