It's the name of a town AND an adjective that describes that town!

So...I've got to say it. Forgive me.

Nice is nice.

Wow...so nice. But this is just a quick shoutout to all you folks that I got in safe, have my hostel, have already spent a couple hours lying on the beach working on my tan, taken a few pictures, seen more topless tourists than I wanted to, and am having a ton of fun already.

Despite our train having been late this morning due to a fire on the tracks.

And the fact that I'm running on four hours of sleep.

Yeah, I could do without that.

Cathy's up in the room taking a nap, but I'm not very good at midday napping. Only when I'm sick, or when the clocks have changed recently. So I decided to hang out downstairs with the free internet. There are eight computers at the hostel, six of which work. I changed out of my swimsuit, took a shower (yay, the showerhead could be mounted on the wall, unlike chez Danielle) and am killing time until dindin.

Yeah, I said dindin.

I'm feeling a little spastic right now, can you tell?

Well, the longer this post gets the more I figure I'll just go ahead and say. I don't remember quite when the last time I got an update up was--Monday? Tuesday? One or the other, but I forgot to look. Well, I'm just going to skip over classes and hop straight to this morning.

A 6h42 train, a desperate sprint through the train station to our track only to find out that it wasn't necessary and the announcement "your train is at the platform right now" was a lie, another sprint to the train car, four hours of train ride through a series of progressively more gorgeous towns, and here I am in Nice, right over by Italy. On the Cote d'Azur. That's the French riviera, folks.

Take THAT.

And as you take that, picture me doing a happy little victory dance involving copious arm waving and maybe a little "running man" or "the sprinkler." Or both.

Our hostel is so close to the train station that we can hear that FREAKING three-tone SNCF jingle that precedes every announcement. I'm going to dread those three notes for the rest of my born days by the time this trip is over. Cathy and I dumped our duffel bags onto our bunks (top bunk for me--just like band camp!) and headed in the general direction of the ocean to see what we could see.

We saw many things. Like tourists. And STORES. Lots and lots and lots of stores. That sell things for the tourists to buy. We also saw Justin! Just bumped into him. Like...hey, here comes one of the twenty people from the Avignon group, just walking down this street by us at the same time by pure coincidence.

I'm going to do a better Nice post when I have more time. The function of this one was really just to let you all know I got here safe, despite late trains, track fires, ambiguous methods of addressing buildings in France, confirmation codes, etc. etc.

I'll be in Nice until Sunday afternoon, so I may or may not be hopping down here to the internet room at night to do a little catchup work. I didn't bring my laptop here, didn't want to deal with it in a hostel, so I won't be able to do any big fancy blog posts until I'm back in Avignon, but feel free to comment and email and things and I'll probably find some time to return them between adventures.

Ciao, bellas!
--G