Nice, France - Sept 24 to 26, 2009

We spent 3 nights in Nice, France, right in the heart of the French Riviera. The city itself didn't have a lot of touristy things to offer. There were expensive shops as expected and a smaller old town full of cafes and ice cream shops. Truth-be-told we didn't spend much time exploring. We had booked our room in advance. We picked one that sounded great, but we didn't spend the time reading any of the reviews. This place was hell! L'oiseau Bleu. After backpacking for 2 months now, you can imagine we have seen some sketchy places, but this one takes the cake. It was run by a creepy old French guy who didn't speak a word of English. He is the entire staff. Let's say that cleaning is not his forte. I won't go into too much detail but the room was disgusting. The bathroom floor was thick with pubic hairs and there was crap/urine on the floor and walls. I took pictures but I'm not going to post them.

We spent the rest of the night looking online and phoning other hostels looking for a replacement. We also had to argue with the guy (French Book and Google Translator in hand) explaining that we wanted to cancel our reservation. He got pretty flustered and started making farting sounds at us and tsk tsk tsk'ing us for backing out of our "obligation". I wish I could speak French. I'd have some choice words for him. He didn't understand any of the English I was speaking. We ended up paying for the first night (already paid a deposit online). We have our own sheets for the trip, so we threw them over the beds and slept in jeans, with our running shoes still on, haha. Neither of us showered or anything, it was too much. The next day we found another hostel that was much better, it was old, but the lady running it was very friendly and helpful.

We ended up not seeing a lot of the city. We walked down to the beach, which is made entirely from smooth rocks. We walked through the old town and then back down the main street. We visited some shops and ended up getting some gelato, but it didn't even come close to what we had in Italy.






The main street was full of weird colour changing statues that looked like Dr. Manhattan:



Talk about a dedicated street busker! This guy dragged his piano down to the street corner:


We were pretty disappointed with the amount of time we actually spent in Nice, but decided we didn't want to stay an additional day. The next morning we were off for a day trip to Monte Carlo, Monaco.