so i didn't really have much planned out after paris. though i'd like to play it cool and pretend like this didn't matter at all to me, with my last day in the hostel i had booked fast approaching and the knowledge that it was no small feat to find a place to sleep in paris, i was slightly nervous. ok, i was freaked out. as luck would have it, i had another friend who was in a similar situation.
she wasn't exactly stranded in a foreign country with no where to sleep the next night. actually, she was in london living comfortably in her flat and going into a 9-5 every day, but she was "freaking out" in the sense that she had just moved to london from NZ and was wanting to travel around europe. so since i had nothing going on, we decided to meet up in spain and go on a mini holiday together.
as you can tell by the title of this post, however, this is not going to be about spain. rather it's about my journey TO spain, through the south of france - starting in nice.
le plage.
garden outside of the musee des beaux arts.
again, this wasn't exactly a part of the plan, but i knew that i had to be in spain in a little over a week and i also knew i couldn't afford to spend that much more time in paris, so i started to think of places i could go in between. i had been to nice before on the same trip that took me through paris last time. we had only stayed for one day, but all i can remember is that i really liked that day and i had wished at the time that we had more time there. so i decided to make all my wildest dreams come true and booked an overnight bus to nice.
most people dissuaded me from doing this - it isn't exactly on the way to spain as you have to go a little further west rather than east, and they also made it clear that they felt a week in nice would be slightly on the boring side. since i'd been running around in a few major european cities pretty much nonstop for three weeks at this point, i though "boring" might be exactly what i was looking for.
eglise st. jeanne d'arc. boring, right?
a really boring looking casino.
notre dame de nice - totally boring.
turns out, it wasn't so boring after all as my trip yet again surprised me with some serendipity. i'm not sure if i'll regret using that word for it's romantic movie connotations, but three of my girlfriends from new york were actually traveling through the south of france at the EXACT same time. and were going to be in nice at the EXACT same time. all of which i found out when i went to wish one of them a "happy birthday" on facebook and saw a few people had posted "have fun in france!" as an addendum to their birthday wishes.
it was the perfect trip - the perfect amount of solo beach time (in an attempt to pretend like i'm french and remove a few tanlines), nice catch up dinners, and gelato. ok, maybe there was a bit too much gelato, but i left nice last time with the feeling that i would like to spend more time there, and my feelings haven't changed.
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