Nice, Land of The Sunburns

So, Nice.  Well, what Blake failed to mention on his overly positive last blog post (you can always count on Blake to gloss over all the complaining.  That’s how you can tell our blog posts apart…mine are complainy, and his….aren’t) was that he spent the last couple of days in Paris with the remains of my cold.

Blake taking some German drugs.

Poor Blake.  After watching me suffer through Berlin and continuing to share Coca Cola Light’s with me, he found himself “at around 75%” (Blake rates his sickness using a percentage scale) after a few days in Paris.  Luckily for him, I had bought some sort of weird drops in Germany, which I never took thanks to my discovery of the joys of Tylenol Sinus.  After interpreting the proper dosage to “ten drops every hour,” he took this medicine with some trepidation (again, the liver.  I am scared of it.)  For our last couple of days in Paris, Blake has been downing this medicine and looking somewhat like a drug addict.  So, with this in mind (and Blake at 30% – his estimation) we boarded our train for Nice

Luckily for us, the Nice train runs a straight 6 hours, and because we were on the last train out (the only one with open reservations) – we were actually in first class.  Blake slept his way through the train ride, pausing only for a delicious dinner of ritz crackers, and before you knew it NICE!

This is what Nice (or at least somewhere near Nice...I actually have no idea what city this was taken in) looks like during the day.

At night.  Which looks like any other city at night.  We followed our surprisingly detailed instructions to the hostel, and after an hour spent waiting on the final bus ride (a 2 minute ride up a hill), we arrived at our only “true” hostel of the trip.  Because Blake was feeling so terrible, our reserved 10 bed room sounded maybe like some sort of torture, so we sprung for an upgraded shared 2 bedroom.  Unfortunately, this was not available every night, so we began our three nights of three different beds.  Our first night was pretty tame.  Unlike our Munich hostel, this place keeps the sub-22 year olds corralled in the bar, and we were able to sleep peacefully.  Blake woke up at “60%,” so we ate a quick chocolate cereal breakfast and headed to our first suggested beach.  After a tram ride and a bus ride, we arrived at a rocky little beach (although less rocky than the rock pile that is Nice.)

My feet and the rock beach. If you look in the distance at the floating white thing....why, there's Blake!

We swam,

Hi From Nice (and a zoomed in camera)!!

wore sunscreen, read our books, and drank warm diet coke before heading out for a pizza lunch.

You can ALMOST see some boobs. Almost.

We moved to a slightly less rocky beach for the afternoon and some of us (Blake) gawked at the topless women, while others (Kristi) tried to take pictures of them (and failed.)  After noticing a nice pinkness to Blake’s ankles, we moved to the shade, where we slept and planned our dinner (well, I planned our dinner.)  We headed back to Nice and proceeded to have our number 1 rated dinner so far.  I had a gigantic plate of “moules” or “mussels”

That is a lot of mussels.

and Blake had some delicious squid ink risotto , and we finished off with a delicious caramel sundae.  Seriously.  I was in heaven.

The next day, Blake and I both awoken to an unpleasant skin situation.  What had seemed vaguely pink the night before, had turned out to be fire engine red.  Mainly Blake.  Thankfully, I have lived a life full of sunburns, and am hyper-aware of the areas of my skin not receiving proper protection at all time.

From someone who knows a little something about sunburns....that is a bad one. Ouch.

Blake is currently blaming the aerosol sunscreen applicator….but…..i’m not that sunburned, and he is.  And I am way more pale.  Something tells me it might (just MAYBE) be the applicator.  But anyways.  We head to another suggested beach in Monacco.  As we headed down the one million mile hill (knowing full well we would soon have to walk right back up that sucker), we debated paying for a lawn chair and an umbrella.  However, when we reached the bottom, we discovered that this cost 30 euro a piece!  Insanity!  So, poor Blake didn’t take his shirt off (he has a red belly) and used his towel to cover his bright red legs.  I tried to tell him that, being a Dansereau, I was very familiar with the old “shirt on at the beach” move, and that he should just jump in the water wearing his shirt with pride (and that I have more than one brother extremely familiar with this move,) but he was stubborn (and maybe embarrassed?) so he stayed all covered up, while I swam around and played in the water all alone.

That's my future home.

We didn’t stay in the sun that long, and soon headed back to Nice, where we watched the only English move (Tamara Drewe….British….British humor,) and ate some dinner (McDonald’s…..sorry, we needed to save some money….and also use WIFI!!!) before heading back for our last night in the hostel and our first night in our only real “hostel” room (10 bed dorm.)  After waiting up as long as possible (11:00…so tired!) we were the first to enter the room for the night.  There were two Australian girls heading out for the night, and we old fogeys talked to them for a while, before discussing how pathetically old we were in comparison to everyone there.  Seriously.  I don’t know the average age, but mentally, I’m old.  They all have their stuff just EVERYWHERE full of dirt and garbage and then they come in and pass out at like 5:00 am.  It just seems so tiring and unsanitary.  Plus they all fart in their sleep.  I know this, because I woke up approximately 500 times.

We are now enjoying ourselves in the great Cinque Terre.  We are thinking about extending our time here and decreasing it in Rome.  That is how great it is.  GREAT.  Ok, I will let Blake write about it.

One observation:

I have seen more dog balls here than I have in an entire lifetime in the US.  Europeans don’t neuter their dogs!  They just let them grow giant balls that flop around!  In front of me!  And then I giggle, because I am approximately 12.  Ok.  Observation over.

Instead of thoughts about dog balls, I thought I would leave you with this picture of Blake and I at the beach. Pre-sunburn. Look how happy and unassuming Blake looks...