Wouldn’t It Be Nice?

Nice, indeed.

This has been the perfect vacation from my vacation, as a saying I’ve heard European travel expert Rick Steves use quite a bit goes. I fell so hard in love with the place at which I am staying, and when you combine that with the fact that so many things in the next place I want to visit — the Cinque Terre in Italy — aren’t open on Tuesdays in the low season, I decided to stay here a couple days longer than I had originally planned. And I don’t regret it at all.

On Thursday, I sat on the terrace of my top-floor apartment with nothing but the Promenade des Anglais between myself and the Mediterranean, and before I knew it, the clock had somehow reached 3 p.m. and I had accomplished nothing but watching planes come in, sweep across over the sea, and land at the nearby airport. I am sure some would find the noise from the air traffic annoying, but I found it fantastic.

That night, I took a stroll down on the Promenade, and this is when I want to address something that I haven’t touched on since I’ve been here but has been on my mind at several different places. It was impossible for me to not think about the 2016 terrorist attack that killed 86 and injured hundreds of others right there where I walked.

I thought about it in London as I recalled the 2005 bombings on the Underground. I thought about it in Paris as I recalled the awful 2016 attacks there.

I go through a range of emotions, from anger to sadness, and then I try to make some semblance of sense out of it. Why on earth would someone have such a radically ideology that would lead them to do such awful things? I can’t find all the answers to that deep question, but I know that doing something like this journey can’t hurt. I think we should all push outside of our cultural comfort zones and really try to understand others instead of simply asserting our own superiority.

Obviously the European culture isn’t too far different from the one to which I’m accustomed, but especially in the larger cities, I have certainly been exposed to many different types compared to those found in Franklin, Tenn., Huntsville, Ala., and Sarasota, Fla. And when this voyage here is complete, I certainly have a desire to push those comfort boundaries further, to learn more about other folks in other places.

But first I have to be able to go to a French restaurant and not totally lose my mind.

And so on Friday, I headed to Old Nice around lunchtime with that objective in mind.

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Old Nice is amazing, with maybe the most narrow streets I’ve walked yet, and with colorful old-world buildings that reach higher into the sky than those in York or Bath. My stroll led me to a restaurant I had picked out, and after doing an additional lap around the outdoor market adjacent to the eatery, I psyched myself up enough to do it.

And then there was the loud, shocking sound of a bottle of glass breaking.

It couldn’t have been more than 10 or 15 feet away from me, and it was much louder than had it simply been dropped or if the older gentleman with a baby stroller in front of me had run over it. He looked back at me, and we stared at each other in silent disbelief. I don’t know what he said to me nor do I know what he said to others around us, but I could tell he was angry and that no one knew where the bottle had come from.

The older guy then looked up to the tall building next to us and started shouting, and I think we all came to the conclusion that someone had thrown the bottle out of a window above us. I have no idea why, and I’m not sure I want to know.

Startled, I for sure wanted to sit down and change the subject quickly, so I headed straight for the terrace of the restaurant, greeted the host with a bonjour and asked if he spoke English. “A little,” he said. That’s totally fine! It worked! I thought to myself. I told him it was just me and preferred to sit outside, and I followed him to the table feeling oh so very proud of myself.

“Bonjour, français ou anglais?” the server asked when she came to greet me, and I have to admit, I was a little disappointed to not put my new-found confidence to the test but answered “English, please” nonetheless.

I have zero idea why I freaked myself out so much about that, but I’m glad to have put it behind me.

I decided to walk back to the apartment from Old Nice along the Promenade, and it was a totally different experience during the day. It was more crowded but with fewer people running or biking along the path, it seemed more relaxed. The sea was calm and beautiful. It simply didn’t feel like a February day, with the temperature close to 60F. Just lovely.

I spent Saturday mostly on the terrace of the apartment again, watching Everton and just relaxing prior to taking my first stroll that evening along the rocky beach. One of the things I was looking forward to about Brighton — a place I had to skip because of the industrial action at the time in England — was a beach made of stone instead of sand, and so I was glad to experience that here finally.

I. Hate. Sand. So this was perfect for me.

With Monaco being so close, I couldn’t resist the urge to mark off my third country, so on Sunday that’s where I headed. After going to look at the Casino Monte-Carlo, I headed down towards the water where I saw yacht after yacht after yacht. And honestly y’all, I just didn’t like it. It was all just way too lavish for me, and I returned to the train station much sooner than I had planned to just wait for my train back to Nice.

I don’t begrudge the individuals, but I do begrudge a society that allows a certain select few to hold so much wealth. There has to be a better approach.

But at least the train station was cool.

At some point on Sunday I also started to notice a bit of a pain in that area of your foot right under your toes, and so with a lot of exploring coming up at the Cinque Terre, Florence, and Rome, I decided to just take it easy the past couple days. Hard to really complain about getting to just sit and look out at the Mediterranean, especially since it’s been quite angry yesterday and today, with some of the biggest waves I’ve ever seen in person.

The first few nights I couldn’t hear the sea over the traffic, but the past two nights, it is the sound of the waves crashing along the shore that has won out. Even with the doors to the terrace shut, the glorious cacophony of water lashing out against land has filled my apartment.

Sure has been… Nice.