Interrail Europe 2002

Day Four (Thurs 17th) - The King of Pop

Despite good intentions of packing the night before neither of us ended doing so, instead we got up at 6am and washed, dressed and packed in 45 minutes. At the station we had some coffee and snacks before boarding the train at 07:45, although we departed on time there were several delays during the journey though it was difficult to decipher the French announcements on the trains. The train was fairly empty so we managed to get a couple of seats each and managed to sleep for a while although Baz was kept awake by an armed gendarme repeatedly extending and collapsing his telescopic side-handled baton.

We arrived in Nice at about 2:30pm and popped into the tourist information office and picked-up a map to a place called the ‘Backpackers Hotel’. When we got to the Hotel it was closed for the afternoon, as we were leaving a woman in a café next-door beckoned us over and told us she had beds to let for €15/night in the same building so we went up for a look. The place she showed us was abysmal, it was dirty and looked like it was falling apart at the seams but that wasn’t the most off-putting factor. As we walked into the room were supposed to stay in there were five guys sat talking who suddenly stopped to look at us, Barrie and I could both feel their eyes examining us for any signs of valuable or saleable items. Without being too rude we made our excuses and left at the fastest walking pace we could manage.

We decided that instead of hostels we’d look for a cheap hotel, I’d much rather pay a little more to know that we weren’t going to be brutally robbed. We headed for a hotel called Des Alizés which was full (it didn’t look that good either) and then for Les Oranges which only had dorms available. We had a look at the dorm and despite the fact that we’d be sharing with an EXTREMELY attractive girl (Swedish maybe, neither of us had a clue what she was saying) there were signs that others were staying in the room too and the place was grubby and felt unsafe. It was a hot day and we’d been walking with our rucksacks for about an hour now, we walked towards the sea-front hoping to find some less scummy hotels and saw a sign for a ‘Comfort Hotel’, part of a chain. We decided that high price was more than worth paying to know we had good security and good service. All they had left was a double room so we went for it, we got an en-suite bathroom and shower, TV, digital safe and a buffet breakfast - Barrie even volunteered to sleep on the floor so I got the bed!

We went for a walk into town, found the beach and went to a McDonalds, normally I’d avoid places like that whilst traveling but the idea of having a beer in a McDonalds was far too tempting. I had a Kronenbourg, a Daim McFlurry and a McCrispy (cornflake cake), Barrie also had a beer and a Royale with Cheese. After leaving McDonalds we saw a guy on the pavement with a beatbox doing a bizarre dance to a Michael Jackson tune (oooh-hooo, eeee-heee), we wandered around for a while and went in a Bang & Olufson shop and a Virgin Megastore.

The Virgin was enormous and I easily found a couple of CDs that I fancied buying, the only problem was that I didn’t have enough cash on me so I needed to go back to the hotel to get my credit-card out of the safe. We only had 20 minutes until the store closed but it should have been an easy task, it wasn’t. We spent 15 minutes trying to find the hotel, eventually we made it and I picked up the card and headed back to Virgin, unfortunately Nice is not the sort of place you can navigate easily and it took at least another 20 minutes to find the shop again. By the time we arrived the shop had closed so for no apparent reason then we walked round the corner and saw the hotel – all this time they’d been about 300m apart and it took us over half an hour to get there and back.

After that little fiasco we sat down on a bench to decide what to do, in absence of any good ideas we decided to wait for the next dog to walk by (there are LOTS of small dogs in Nice) and go in whatever direction it came from. As we were sat waiting we heard approaching police sirens and I said to Barrie “They’re coming to get us for being weird”, at this point they swerved onto the wrong side of the road coming straight towards us, a guy jumped out whilst the car was still moving and the car screeched to a halt about 25m away from us. Thankfully they weren’t after us and they piled into Virgin, we went to take a look at what was happening and as luck had it we saw a small dog so we went in the direction it came from which took us into town. We had pizza for dinner, I had four-cheeses and Barrie had mussels, his pizza was totally COVERED in about 80 individual mussels, not bad for a few Euros. Whilst walking back to the hotel we began to see a little bit of the seedier side to Nice, as the night progresses the streets fill-up with street-hawkers and lingering types – at one point we pretended to look at a menu so that the guy following us would walk past. We ducked into the hotel to ask where to find a Tabac (Barrie needed cigarettes) and ended up wandering for ages, eventually we found an off-license which was next to a launderette. We went back to the hotel and watched CNN for a while, planned the next day and went to sleep.

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