Five photos: the streets of Old Nice

Nice is perhaps most often thought of as a cosmopolitan vacation spot, attracting Frenchmen and foreigners alike to its pebbled beaches and warm climate, but at its heart it remains a simple village. Bistros are built into houses with shuttered windows and sun-dried paint, and the streets that wind through the center of Old Nice are just wide and labyrinthine enough for a wanderer to get lost for a few hours in a world before cars and buses. Even the tourist-busy Place Masséna is lined with buildings hearkening back to an older era that at night point toward alleys illuminated by the soft glow of lanterns.

Villa Masséna

After a day of hospital shadowing and classes, we went to a nice little museum called the Villa Masséna.

Our tour guide took great pains to illustrate the rich historical context of the villa--which, according to Wikipedia, was constructed by a prince named Victor Masséna--but I unfortunately stopped listening after he decided to spend 25 minutes explaining the captions written next to a dozen or so black-and-white photographs. What I have instead are two color photos that pretty much sum up the whole hour-and-a-half ordeal.

One thing I did remember from the guide was this curious clock that has most of its numbers obscured. The idea is that the woman is trying to hide the clock from her guests to prevent them from seeing the time and going home.

On the second floor of the villa was a gallery featuring pictures of Nice from a century ago, portraits of famous individuals who frequented the area, and posters boasting the wonders of the coastal city. Here's an advertisement featuring two ladies who are obviously enjoying a "winter in Nice."

Among some of the most recognizable patrons of Nice (including Queen Victoria) was Berlioz, who has a bust featured in one of the rooms.

Speaking of busts, a little ways away from the Villa Masséna is this blue-skinned demon head perched atop a building. Its eyes follow you as you walk past... plus that color is just disturbing. I think it's meant for a casino.

Beer time and Persian tomatoes

Some obligatory beach pictures to start things off. The beaches in Nice are pebbled, not sandy, so you need to bring a blanket if you want to lie down.

So I started shadowing in the hospital yesterday--the first hour in the neurology department was a tad intimidating, since no one seemed to know who I was. It was also hard to explain what “year” I was in, since the French education system is so different from the American one. Luckily, there’s another girl in the program who has the same rotation as me, so we stuck together and cooperatively translated our way through the day.

I don’t have pictures of the hospital yet, unfortunately, and I’m not sure if there are regulations that prohibit taking them (although the French seem much less stringent about such things). My impression, though, is that the hospitals seem a lot less steel-gray and sterile—not sure if that’s a reflection of the French healthcare system in general or of the ocean breezes and Mediterranean glow that drift in through the windows of all the patients’ rooms.

We had a seminar in one of the medicine buildings, and someone had written a little message on one of the chalkboards just outside the classrooms.

Later in the afternoon, I hopped on a bus going in the wrong direction and ended up in some unknown corner of Nice. Fortunately, the bus stop for the other direction was nearby. I took a picture of the location; maybe I’ll come back to explore some other time.

Incidentally, I learned something curious about giving directions in French. The French usually don’t use cardinal directions (e.g., “New Haven is north of New York” or “this boulevard is farther east than that one”) and prefer to use left/right and up/down instead.

For dinner, I helped my host mother make tomates farcies (which I at first misinterpreted as a Persian ("Farsi") dish but is apparently distinctly French). They’re tomatoes stuffed with rice and meat, then crusted with breadcrumbs and olive oil.

We made them with onions, too—cute little things.

We also started a ratatouille, which is somewhat less glamorous than the Pixar film would have you think. Still, it’s a hearty, traditional dish native to Nice, and with all the vegetables that go into making it, it’s bound to be good for you.

I’d forgotten how onions make my eyes tear up and how the odor clings to my fingers no matter how vigorously I wash them. Reminds me of Dumpling Night, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale.

First impressions

There's a reason they call it the "Azure Coast."

Looking out the window of the airplane as it makes a final turn before its descent, I see a nearly seamless expanse of deep blue, broken only by the thin white line of a rising wave. It's one of those startlingly vivid blues that holds your eyes prisoner with its sheer intensity, one that merits a name as lofty as "azure."

The liquid sapphire runs straight up to the coast, which cushions Nice and its neighboring cities. From this vantage point, Nice really does look like one of those picturesque Mediterranean spots featured on glossy postcards that sell for a dime a dozen, where everyone in their mid-forties who wants something more European than California or Miami dreams of retiring. The air seems absurdly crisp, clear enough that I can imagine counting the red tiles on the houses below.

I'm surprised to see that the water runs flush against the runway, as if the plane is almost skimming the surface of the sea as it lands. It's a little hard to see in this picture, but if you look closely, there's a thin strip of blue where the coast meets the sky.

Introductions

This blog is as much a way to document my time abroad as it is a place to dump all the random iPhone pictures I take.

I'm spending five weeks in Nice, France, for a program run through WashU called "France for the Pre-Med"--which seems suspiciously like a ploy to get Yale to pay me to go on a nice vacation (haha, so punny) but is actually more legit than the name would suggest. Every morning I shadow a neurology team at l'Hôpital Pasteur for a few hours, and in the afternoon I take a couple of French courses about medicine, illness, and society.

Weekends are the largest chunk of free time we have, so I'll hopefully be making a few excursions to Cannes or Monaco, and maybe even Paris and northern Italy. I'm also spending a week in London after the program--a convenient side effect of an unavoidable layover.

Lots of photos (and ideally some pretty ones) will follow! I'm hoping to update pretty regularly since I'm planning to take a bunch of pictures. Someone even suggested I do a videoblog--that might be fun, so we'll see...