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.