Carnival time!

The weather was supposed to be good in the mountains this Sunday, so we'd planned to go skiing with Ilario and Christina. Unfortunately the weather forecast went a bit bad last-minute, so we decided to cancel and have lunch in Nice instead. Since Ilario and Christina are planning to go to Japan soon, we decided Kamogawa - one of the most reputed Japanese restaurants in Nice, was a good restaurant to go for. Actually, we were a little bit disappointed with the place. It's proper Japanese food, for sure, but the service was not (indifferent is the best way to describe the service - not particularly Japanese). But anyways, we had a nice time promoting our favourite tourist attraction to Ilario & Christina ;-)

Nice Carnival is actually on at the moment. It's an old tradition in Nice (dating all the way back to the 13th century, at least), and is also the most popular one in France and possibly all of Euroie, with over 1 million visitors annually. Which is kind of the problem with Nice Carnival - it's over commercialized these days, all about the money so to speak.

Don't expect any Rio de Janeiro style madness either, or the veiled mystery of the Venice Carnival. No, this is all about family-friendly, sanitized fun. They even banned the anti-carnival (the non-commercial version of the carnival) a couple of years ago.

In spite of these slight misgivings, we decided to have a peek - after all, the weather was great and the "corso carnelavesque" is still good fun. Actually, much to our surprise, it was easier to access the corso this year - last year they made it quite difficult to enjoy the carnival with big fences blocking off almost all areas from access.

So it was pretty good fun in the end - this year around the theme was music (last year the theme was the football world cup).