Friday April 22 - Sunday April 24

 Friday April 22

Coolish, cloudy day. Walked into the old town for lemon, fresh pasta and olives for tonight's veal scallopini limone. 

We walk past this little hardware store at the end of our street every day. I swear the merchandise in the window is the same as three years ago.  It is definitely not Home Hardware standard. But works for most residents in the community. 

Tools!!

We also walk past this palais most days, a beautiful museum we've visited in the past, so just a park through the open doors. 

This is Lyndas favourite olive stall, we've price shopped, they're half the price of other stalls and the shops in the old town. The owner is always smiling. Generally a wait to get served. 

Not too discernable, but a man with a parrot on his shoulder. 

Our objective this afternoon was to walk from the apartment to a cave that primitive peoples used  hundreds of thousands of years ago when they walked out of Africa,  when they were roaming the land and hunting.

Our route from the port took us up hill, then down steep steps to the caves, and then back along the water and through the port again.  You can see how the elevation, and buildings change in this string of photos. 

Very, very unusual sighting,  what looks like a single detached house in Nice! 

Many buildings have beautiful freise work on them. 

Nice has a population of around 350,000, and everyone lives on top of everyone else. In the hills, there just maybe an old standalone farmhouse. 

Chances are this will be divided up into apartments. 

Buttress with original wall left in between to break up the brick work.  Some one actually thought of aesthetics and decided it would be better than a brick face. 

An old palais that the city is planning to renovate. 

Those are new roll up shutters.  Some part must be livable. 

From the very top of the trail, looking down 

A row of windsurfers being towed out. You'll see them again 

At school, we were forced to mémorise poetry, one that came  to mind when I saw this gate, The Road Through The Woods, by Kipling ... 

They shut the road through the woods

Seventy years ago. 
Weather and rain have undone it again, 
And now you would never know 
There was once a road through the woods 

Notice the plants on the left totally dried out...

The grounds of the cave museum have some life size cutouts of the animals that would have been hunted so long ago 

Ok, so here's a brief history of the world! 

We all walked  out of Africa, hung around the Mid East for a while, then started walking west to France .  

Along the way, we learned how to hunt. 

The Nice valley was a known hunting ground, for 10's of 1,000s years.  Neanderthals  would visit between August and October, hang out in the cave, corner the animals between the mountains and the ocean around Nice, one large animal trap, eat well, then move on.  They knew what they were doing! 

But every 10 thousand years or so, there'd be an ice age, so the cave entrance would be covered, then thousands of years later, the glaciers melt, the water levels drop, but leaving a layer of sediment each time in the caves.   The peoples returned, hunted, until the next ice age, and the cycle begins again. 

The cave was always at sea level then.   So in the caves as archeologists dug down,  there were about three discernable levels of habitation between ice ages, spanning over the hundreds of thousands of years of visits. 

In the 1900's a doctor living above decided to build a wine cellar ....I mean, who,wouldn't. Perfect temperature for storing a bordeaux or côté du Rhône. 

A big hole down through the rock.  

You may have noticed a wire grid in some of the photos. The archeologists  used the grid to accurately locate finds. 

Here's a sample notebook.  

 

Some remains in the museum are from other areas .Heres a skull from 28,000 years ago, from a cave in France 

And pause on this one!  Over 2 million years ago, from Africa. Amazing to see this.  

This earth, and all we see around us was not created for us, it was for the people who came before us, and those who will come after. And not just  "our grandchildren" who we all worry about, but the grand children for the next few millions of years. We tend to exclude them in our thinking.

 And still we fight over the lot size of our house, or the right to take the riches out of the earth just for our enjoyment, or the right to invade a country or a continent  because we want a bigger border on our maps... 

2 million years from Africa 

450,000 years from France 

The windsurfers were far out. 

Another rare house! Could almost be a property in Nanaimo. 

A famous restaurant with a shady past. Too long it relate here. 

In case you were wondering ... 

This part of the restaurant, built on a rock, has been used in a few movies. Note the diver at the top,  diving in 

Well, a one armed diver.. 

Beautiful architecture around the port. 

Planes and boats! 

Here's the supper creation, veal,  fresh egg pasta, sauce of chopped olives, because we had no capers,  lemon, and chicken stock because we had no white wine.  

Saturday April 23

Rainy day. 

And an unplanned change in itinerary! 

We've made a decision to visit Italy for 3 days. We enjoy our Ventimiglia day trips so much we have decided to spend 3 days next week in a town called Sanremo, just 20 minutes further east on the train, but it's about 2x the size of Ventimiglia.  We've found a décent Airbnb in the town and we'll leave Monday and return Thursday. 

So with that in mind, we walked to the train station to try and buy our tickets tickets. Put my French to an extreme test, and managed to get the agent to smile at a joke.. Just  Partially successful though on the tickets. The agent could only get us to Ventimiglia because she couldn't access the Italian train system for the next short leg.  So we'll just get them in the train station in Ventimiglia.  It's always quite quiet in that station there .. so should be quick to line up and buy.  Should be... 

Afternoon, we walked to the Cours Saleya market area to the photography museum. We had held this museum to do on a rainy day. 

Pro tourist tip, don't walk in the centre of the alleyway, you get dripped on from awnings on both sides. 

A fake olive tree

A real olive tree 

A video playing at the museum, THIS IS THE GUITAR I WANT TO BUY!!! but can't find anywhere in North America (yes, I have been scouring web sites for months (because I need a left hand version..) 

Love Reinhardt 

A pizza shop with a pizza ordering system.  Order on the touch screen, pay with your credit card, they push it out from one of the slots.  Think about the efficiencies for the owner.  Every other person ordering will be a tourist from some where in the world, speaking their language. Taking the order the normal way,  would take 3-4 times as long in understanding . taking the credit card even more  time. And during the last two years of pandemic impossible to maintain distances at a walk up ordering stand. 

This way he can hire cooks that don't  speak French even, and just have them cook.  

And because it's raining, Umbrella photo opportunities!  

Artistic umbrella 

Bold umbrella 

Circus umbrella 

Hippy umbrella 

Conférence umbrella  

Priestly umbrella 

Corporate umbrella 

Go Nice! Umbrellas! (A bit niche, red and black are the colours of the nice football team.  They're all over town. )

Lemoncello umbrella 

And memorial umbrella, to the big storm of 2022

For supper, a return to the Socca D'or on our street where we lunched with Antoine. Convenient because of the rain but also, excellent food and friendly service. 

Here's the interior of the restaurant when you make a reservation for 6pm in France. We were on our own until about 8pm (we had a long leisurely supper!) 

Trivia. If you expand the dessert menu on the wall, and look at the symbol on the left.  It's an icon of a pot with a "roof" , it's the universal symbol over here to show its made in house. Kinda original and cute! 

This is the famous niçoise socca.. chickpea bread. 

Beef daube, another niçoise dish, ravioli filled with meat, and some meat on the top.  Very slow cooked. I've tried making this a few times but it takes the experts to do it well. 

And we both had the caramel pannacotta. It was excellent but I think I've eaten my last one, I'm not a dessert person, and  my digestion cannot handle rich food at the end of the day.  But, then,  never say never! 

Sunday 24th April

The rain turned into a thunder and lightning show overnight but the morning turned blue so we went with our plan to visit Cap Ferrat , à port by Villefranche.  Sunday bus schedule, but we just made sure we planned accordingly to not miss a bus. 

It's a small, quiet port normally but more so on a Sunday which is also Election Day. 

Lynda scouting out her patisserie to ensure they still had walnut tarts.  3 left, buy now, or later? 

The smallest market we've seen in France. One stall! 

Almost  the entire quay is comprised of restaurants. 

And one voting station 

We were happy to find  our  pizzeria that we've eaten at before. We've always eaten inside normally because it's chilly in January!  

The view from our table today. 

Pizza Blanche, Pear, walnut, Brie, Gorgonzola 

And we found our pizza restaurant has a cute takeout truck! 

Back to pick up the tarts. 

17 million euro ! Russians are selling out.  There's a big Russian presence in Cap Ferrat, in other years you'd hear lots of Russian spoken in the restaurants.  Estate agents where the ads are only in Russian. 

Perfect For shopping at Save on 

A garage door!

There's a second floor boardwalk above the quay 

The road to the mountain top medieval village of Eze 

And I love the ad slogan on the SNCF train tickets, trolling railways all over the world! 

Amuse yourself on free wifi while travelling at 320km  an hour!  

Also, BCFerries please note..wifi at any speed would be good, it used to be you could get wifi until about 30 mins out of the terminal, now, they've pulled the plug on that.   (I know, I know, go up on deck and enjoy the view instead of being on Twitter...) 

Lynda cooked the rest of our fresh pasta with some pancetta we had left from another meal and. Béchamel sauce that comes in a little Knoor tetrapak that unfortunately is not available in Canada. Last trip Lynda brought two home in the suitcase

And we're off to Italy tomorrow!