A Night at the Opera

My parents were gracious enough to invite us to watch Carmen (yup, that would be the opera) in Cannes. We started off by having a very nice dinner at their newly-decorated flat in Antibes, and then jumped into their Mercedes mini-bus and drove down to Cannes at great haste. We did just make it for the start of the performance, and I actually staid awake, for a change :-). Of course it was all in French and I basically had no idea about what was going on (spoken french I can understand kind of OK, but when it's sang...) - something about a girl working at a cigarette factory (this part I only heard from Mathilde later), playing hard to get in Spain. But in spite of that, it was good fun!

The cool thing was that the performance was at the Palais des Festivals - yes, that's the one that also hosts the Cannes film festival!

Weekend in Rome

Visited Rome this weekend, as it is only about 1 hour's flight from Nice. The trip went quite smoothly, until we had to get from the airport to our hotel. Of course we decided to save a little bit of money and use the famous (for all the wrong reasons) Roman public transport system. To cut a long story short, we ended up being driven from the train station to our hotel in an old banger driven by a half-blind geezer, and naturally ended up paying about the same price as we would've had we just taken the taxi directly from the airport.





The rest of the evening was equally interesting, our hotel reminded me of where I stayed in St. Petersburgh before it was called St. Petersburgh (that's right - from the communist era), and the neighbourhood and the "atmospheric local restaurant" (I'm being ironic here) where we had our dinner were in the same mold, so to speak. (OK, so I'm exaggerating the misery a bit here ;-)

Visiting Rome itself was pretty amazing, I guess you'd struggle to find a ciy with so many historic sites to visit. We saw most of the famous sights during a very energetic day spent walking, like the Spanish Stairs, Piazza Navona, Fontana di Trevi, the Colosseum, Roman Forum, etc., had some very nice meals and enjoyed some very nice weather.


The sunday was somewhat less energetic, although we did have time to take in the Villa Borghese museum and park, as well as Santa Maria Maggiore (which dates back to the 5th century).

Visiting Petite Afrique

Time for this weekend's walk. After the previous day's strenuous activities, we decided to do a short walk near Nice, to Petite Afrique (Little Africa) from Beaulieu-sur-Mer. The area is so called because it has a micro-climat resembling that of Africa, which means that there are numerous plants and trees that cannot be found elsewhere in France (me, being a bit useless with this type of thing, couldn't of course spot any).
But, as always, the views were nice and we once more saw loads of posh houses...

More Finns moving to the Riviera!

Some months ago, my parents decided that putting up with the freezing cold of the Finnish winter (although judging by this one, snow and cold seems to be a thing of the past...) just isn't worth it, so the obvious choice would be to move south! And by accident (I'm sure ;-) they ended up moving about 20 kilometres from Nice, in Antibes!


So having driven through Germany and France in my brother's Volkswagen minibus, filled with furniture and even some of my things, they finally arrived today.
After an interesting day spent mostly at Carrefour buying all the necessities for the flat, we had a nice dinner in the old town, and took the TGV back to Nice...

Walking up to the Fort de la Revere

We decided to be even more ambitious today than the day before (when we walked up to Mont Boron), and walk all the way up Fort de la Revere, situated at the somewhat more respectable height of 696 meters.
The walk began at the dramatically located perched village of Eze (pictured left), one of the prettiest villages on the Cote d'Azur (unfortunately, it seems that about every 2nd house in the village is a restaurant or tourist shop).


After a steep and rather strenuous walk we finally made it up to the fort (which dates back to 1870), which we could not visit, unfortunately. But anyway, we had some pretty nice views from there over the Riviera, as well as the other way towards the Alps.

Above, the fort. To the right, Mathilde enjoying a picnic beneath the fort. And finally, below, the view towards the Alps.

Climbing up Mont Boron

We made the bold decision to take on the daunting task of scaling the heights of Mont Boron, situated between the port of Nice and Villefranche sur Mer. Well, to be perfectly honest, considering the summit is at a less-than impressive height of 191 meters, I suppose daunting task is a bit of an exaggeration ;-)
But anyway, the views over Villefranche and Nice were very nice indeed. And as always it seems on the Cote d'Azur, we were greeted with some rather impressive villas during the walk, and to add some spice to the walk I forgot our map somewhere along the way (fortunately, finding our way back was pretty straightforward!)

Walking around Cap Martin

We went for a walk with Katja and Jani around Cap Martin, just next to Menton. It's a very pretty peninsula, if shall we say somewhat exclusive, judging from some (well, nearly all) the houses we saw on the walk. But very beautiful, with great views towards Menton and the Italian alps on the one side, and towards Monaco on the other side.