Nice

It's good to have the net again. I've been in Porto for about the last 5 nights, in two different hostels, and in both of them my laptop wouldn't talk to their router. Hence the lack of blogging.

After arriving in Nice and checking into my hotel I met up with Julia and her boyfriend and after grabbing some lunch, we gathered supplies and retired to the beach with an esky to drink two bottles of champagne that I had brought with me. After polishing those off we relaxed at the apartment of a friend of theirs, and after eating some Indian food we had a pretty early one. The next day we met at the train station for a daytrip to Monaco, which is only about 20 minutes away by train. After wandering up by the palace for a while, we spent a while in a public swimming pool and then changed into more respectable clothes to go up to Monte Carlo Casino. It cost 10 euro to get into the casino and while the building was beautiful, it was a bit of a disappointment. It was early on a Saturday evening but not much was going on. I was hoping to play some poker but none was running. Oh well. I have a panorama shot of Monte Carlo harbour, it’s pretty big so I could keep the detail in it, so I've put it on a separate link: click here to check it out.

After bailing out back to Nice, we had a night on the town, although Julia and her boyfriend went home earlyish, while I kicked on solo until 5:30 in the morning or something. On returning to my hotel I was sober enough to realise that I'd feel like crap the next morning. My flight to Barcelona left late night the next night, so I decided I should book my room another night and spend most of the day napping. I tried to put this plan into action but the guy at the desk at 6am or whatever it was didn't speak a lot of English, especially not slurred English, and I was unsure if I had made myself understood. I therefore set my alarm for noon the next day, which was checkout time. When it went off, I was hungover as expected, but grabbed the phone and called reception. It turned out that I had succeeded in booking another night.... in the room next door, which involved packing up all my stuff, going down to reception and getting a new key, which defied the point of being able to stay in bed. I grumpily requested they cancel it, gathered my stuff together, and went and got my head straight in the lobby instead. Then I hung out at Julia's apartment until it was time to go and get my flight.

I didn't really achieve much in Nice, but I did have a really fun night out and it was good catching up with Julia. Doecke had told me that Nice sucked and Monaco was great, while I had the opposite experience. He didn't like Nice because it was unfriendly (not my experience) and full of drunk tourists (surely that's the whole point), while I didn't much like Monaco because there was nothing to do once you're over staring at people's Fararis. I wouldn't actually say I disliked the place, but a daytrip was definitely enough.

Onwards to Barcelona!