I meant to update this on Monday but life is getting busier here! I'm in my second week of classes, and they are going really well. I got placed into an intermediate French class, which is taught entirely in French. My language skills are coming back quickly, because for 3 hours a day I listen to and speak only in French-- not to mention speaking in French every time I leave campus. Next week I start a French Art History class, which should be really interesting.
On Saturday, a few friends and I went to the Citrus Festival. We took a train for about 2 hours to Menton, an old city about 10 minutes from the Italian Border. We first stopped to get pizza at 'authentically Italian' place--turns out real Italian pizza is incredible. We then went to the Citrus Festival, which was essentially celebrating the city's history of producing oranges and lemons. It had a ton of floats covered in oranges and lemons, all with the common theme of french cinema. The girls loved it, but I was a little bored after about 15 minutes--I get it, you guys like oranges! We ran into a drum line dressed like warriors at the festival and they were awesome to watch. We ended our day trip to Menton my going to the beach to look at the water and walk around.
The next day, we took a day trip to Nice. Nice is only a 30-45 minute train ride, so it is easy enough that we could go after class sometime. Once we got there, we walked around and explored the city for a while before stopping to get some food. We walked around some more, trying to get to know the city, before we ended up again at the beach watching the waves. Nice is really cool because there are a million cool shops and places to eat, and there were a million people walking around. I also got my first real european gelato, which was unbelievably good.
My study abroad group also went to Grasse this week to learn about perfumes. Grasse is an old city about 45 minutes from Cannes that is basically the perfume center of the world. After touring a perfume history museum and a perfume factory, I just about wanted to remove my nose. Some of the stuff was interesting, but smelling different perfumes for 4 hours was a little bit too much like that SpongeBob episode where he has to run through a store's perfume department dodging the samples. On the plus side, our last tour ended in a laboratory where we were able to make our own samples, so I now have an eau de toilette I made myself. It actually smells pretty good.
Now I'm trying to figure out where to go which weekend. There are so many places I want to see so it's just a matter of planning all the logistics. As of now, next weekend looks like Lyon in France and the weekend after might be Dublin!
Nana, your Dad's grandmother, used to shpritz perfume on everybody who visited her, including all the little boys. Getting out of her apt. without getting smelled up by an atomizer she wielded like a fire hose was a major achievement. She never seemed to run out of the stuff.
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