Well, today was quite the time. I got to Nice last night, and my first impressions of the city were not favorable at all. I thought it was an area were tourists caused the sights, not the other way around. What I mean is, you'll go to a lot of places in Europe expecting genuine stuff, and all you find is something created for the tourists to visit. Thus I say, what causes what?
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What I wrote in the last post about my train ride was expressing just this. Tende and the other cities along the train route to Nice were absolutely beautiful, no other tourists were around, and for this reason I can safely claim that these cities cause the tourist (me). They didn't build these cities to cause my arrival. I hope you see what I mean.
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But after today, I still think that Nice is very much oriented towards it's tourists, but I do believe that there are significant and yet genuine things to see in the city, not just casinos and street performers. Let me put it this way-- I took so many pictures today that I had to come get on the computer to upload my pics and make room for more. This computer is ur-old and it is taking forever, so I thought I'd write on my blog. (my Ipod is has a hard drive 7 times larger than this computer)
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I got up early, went into town and wrote some emails. I treated myself to my favorite french treat: pain au chocolat. Mmmm. After chatting with Jared and Whitney, I left to go to church. The Nice ward was a lot further than I had thought, but I began in hopes of making it to sacrament meeting. While heading off in the direction, I came across a semi-marathon, as they called it. Probably a half marathon. Tons of people. Some people were really struggling.
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I got to church just in time for sacrament. It was a nice ward, and the ami missionaries were very friendly and introduced me to people. But I obviously didn't understand a word of french, which kinda made the whole meeting dry. But I did get the sacrament and I did understand a few words like jour and Joseph Smith.
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Afterwards, I left with not really knowing where to go. But my map said that there was a monestary about a block away with a view of the city, so I thought I should go check it out. It was amazing. It was high up on the hill overlooking Nice with these incredible gardens and next door was the matisse museum and some roman ruins. The whole place was really chill and it was out of the way from all of the tourists. One unique thing was this cemetary with a ton of mosoleums. It looked like some warehouse floor with all of these tombs packed in right together with very little room to walk. Some of them looked really egyptian like as well. It was interesting.
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I then walked back to town, and towards Vieux Nice, which is the high ground at the south of the Nice beach. This is by far the coolest part of town with narrow streets full of art shops and gelatos, and with some really cool plazas and churches. The benefit of traveling in Italy and France is that they remained relatively untouched during the war. That is, Germany was smoked. Nothing was left standing. The allies found out that Hitler really liked Nuernberg, so they leveled 80% of the city in one night. You can tell this while you're there too. The famous buildings have been rebuilt, but the other ones were replaced with modern ones. Vienna (Austria) for example has a sign on a lot of their apartment buildings stating when the building was destroyed and rebuilt.
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But Italy and France, at least the parts that I've been to, have remained overall pretty old. There are a few modern buildings that are here and there, but for the most part they have relatively held on to the more older stuff.
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In any case, this part of Nice is beautiful the hill overlooking this section of town has some great spots to take pictures of the whole beach and sea. They had some artificial waterfalls at the top (created for the tourists-- more causation) that provided a cool extended shutter shot. I certainly enjoyed the day so far.
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I don't have much more to look forward for tonight. Just doing some laundry. But I may jump in the meditterranean, if I get the chance.
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