Day trip to Sanremo

If you happen to follow my blog regularly, you've probably noticed that both me and Mathilde are what one could call big fans of Italy. This year, we've not made it across the border that many times though, so we decided now would be a good time as any to enjoy a day on the Italian Riviera - especially since the weather forecast was promising a nice, sunny, autumn day.

We've actually done most of the touristy stuff on the Italian side of the Riviera (the part that's close to France, anyway) already during our numerous excursions, but after some research on the internet, we finally decided to head to Sanremo - the "cultural excuse" for our trip being Villa Nobel (where Alfred Nobel spent the last years of his life).

It was indeed a nice day to be in Italy. The sun was out, and plenty of folks were walking around, enjoying the nice weather, shopping, and so forth. We started off with Alfred Nobel's villa. It was pretty interesting stuff - plenty of information about Nobel's life, the inventions he came up with, and of course that famous testament, which dictated that a part of his vast fortune (which he mostly made from manufacturing dynamite!) should be given each year to the finest and brightest of mankind. The fact that a lot of the texts were only in Italian gave us a good opportunity to practice our Italian as well ;-).

The cultural bit done, we walked around Sanremo, and then headed off for lunch. We'd done a bit of research in France beforehand, and ended up in a place called B. Bros & Co. Not particuarly Italian-sounding, perhaps, but the food was certainly Italian - and top-notch as well! A real culinary pleasure!
We naturally stopped at Grom's for a delicious naturally flavoured ice creams (cost a lot less than an industrial ice cream full of dodgy stuff would in France, too!).

After enjoying the sun by the sea side for a bit, we jumped in the car and headed back to France. Not before stopping over for a bit of grocery shopping on the I
talian side of the border though - always good fun!

Pub quiz in the port

Last year, we started a sort of an "irregular tradition" (hmm, doesn't make much sense does it?) of doing the Ma Nolan's pub quiz on Thursday nights - which gave me a sort of nice "reliving my youth in England" sort of feeling ;-).

So this particular Thursday, we decided to revive this tradition (at least once!) since it's been rather a while since our last humiliation at Ma Nolan's. Unfortunately, we were missing our regular contributors Aurelien and Julie, but were on the other hand joined by Vincent, Clemence and Sarah.

Unfortunately, we didn't do all that well in the quiz - a fact that I think we can at least partly put down to the fact that we absolutely refuse to cheat (ie. use our smartphones) - but actually, we were about half-way in the ranking, which is better than usual ;-). But let's not forget the most important thing about pub quizzes - they are just an excuse to drink beer and socialize ;-)

Hockey Night!

Being a Finn, I'm naturally quite keen on ice hockey (in a couch potato kind of way, naturally!). One might imagine that Nice might not perhaps be the best place to enjoy this sport - but there is actually a local team (Les Aigles - that is to say the eagles) that's not too bad by French standard (which does of course mean they are rather bad by international standards!). Anyway, since it's been  while since I've seen our local Finnish friends, we decided to head off and check out a hockey game (unfortunately, I wasn't able to convince Mathilde...).

It was a pretty good game actually, with excellent drama - Nice unfortunately lost 2-3 on overtime in the end... Good game from the Finns - Koivu (no, not the brother of Mikko and Saku) and Raikkonen (no, not the brother of Kimi...).

Afterwards, headed off to Rue Massena for a pizza and some catching up with Mikko, Aki and Henna.