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Nice to See Nice, to see Nice, nice
May. 3rd, 2009 07:14 pmNo pictures with this post because I am going to take the 60 centimes a minute hit for three minutes max.
I had a great day today. I finally got my arse in gear and pushed myself to the train station to get the train to Nice.
It’s somehow touching to know that the problems we might have thought endemic to the English rail network on Sundays has at least a parallel in France. First of all I waited 15 minutes or so while two ticket booths dealt with two people. Neither, as far as I could see, wanted to change their nationality. It just appears to take 15 minutes to sell any kind of ticket at SNCF.
None of this annoyed me that much, although the Italians in front of me who wanted to catch a train to Milan were getting understandably vexed. My own train, however, was said to be a 15 minute retard. Before the two people waiting at the ticket booths for their transaction had seen their purchases completed, this delay had turned into 50 minutes, because the railways were “seriously perturbed”. Which is, I guess, what happens when the retards are in control.
It would have been oh-so-easy to give up and return to my hotel, but by now I had the bit between my teeth. This, dammit, was a challenge. I knew that the TAM100 bus went to Nice, so all I had to do was find a bus stop where it might stop. The TAM stops are different from the internal Monaco stops, and it took me a 25-minute walk to find one, but then a bus turned up within seconds.
The TAM110 to the airport (just past Nice) costs E16.60. I was therefore rather pleasantly surprised when I asked for a single to Nice to be told that it cot one euro. “To Nice?” enquired I. One euro it was. Bloody brilliant.
The bus trip gave the opportunity to see some of the towns between Monaco and Nice. Cap d’Ail has streets commemorating Beaverbrook and Churchill (must look up my biog of Beaverbrook to remind myself of the link that Max Aitken had with the place) while Beaulieu sur mer had a very “sub-Monaco” feel to it. Eze, which splits the two, was more to my liking, while Villefranche-sur-mer was beautiful.
Passing a 100 bus going in the opposite direction, I noted that it was considerably more crowded than the bus going into Nice.
But Nice, well, Nice is ace. Fell in love with the place, as simple as that. Following my nose, I walked up to the old castle, which is now a weird high-altitude gardens. This took up more than an hour, including a trip to the Jewish cemetery. Then I descended and went for a walk round the old village, which was packed, open, and busy. I treated myself to a yummy lemon ice-cream.
But on leaving the old town, passing a specialist Oyster restaurant and entering Grimaldi Square, the tow virtually shut, becoming a normal French Sunday. Most weird how the split was so absolute.
I made a quick visit to the Nice Museum of Contemporary Art, a small place on just two floors, featuring no more than a dozen artists. Alun Williams and Yves Klein were the artists that impressed me most. Klein appears to be something of a Nice hero.
Then, as is my wont, I continued my walking exploration. Nice has one tram route, ad the trams are fairly cool.
By now it was about 4.30 in the afternoon, so I decided to eat port-side. This is not to be confused with Port Said. I found a place that looked crowded, walked in, only to be met by a mélange of Australian and New Zealand accents. It was the Kookaburra. I had a superb squid and prawn salad, with the little things got right (tomatoes filleted of the inner seed part, for example). It was meant to be a sweet chili and fresh coriander dressing, but I thought that I detected Jan’s favourite trick, reduced balsamic vinegar. (Well, I did.)
The trip back was enlivened by, believe it or not, what the French would have assumed was an English nutter, since he was speaking and shouting in English. But, here’s the weird thing, he spoke rather poor English with a strong but hard-to-define accent. Russian? Polish? He left half-way along the route, thankfully, last heard screaming on the street. Madness.
I bumped into Daniel Zink on the way back (I had seen his twin brother this morning at breakfast) and asked him how he got on. Seventh, he said. Well, that’s a trousered E250k, which he said was by far his biggest win. He then said that he had bought in directly, which got me thinking. Joe Ebanks had also bought in for the 10k. Both cashed, but how much was that buy-in as a percentage of their entire bankroll? I wouldn’t mind betting that it was a good deal more than 5%. Given the large number of 10K direct buy-ins, either there are many more players with $250k bankroll floating around than I had previously thought, or too many players are directly buying in at levels rather higher than they should be.
A final whinge about this hotel, the one with an Internet connection slightly inferior to that some players said they had experienced in the Third World Poker Open in Somalia. I left some Petits Fours Patissiers on my desk in my “air-conditioned” room. What could go wrong? Well, the fridge underneath the desk, that’s what. It contributes more to global warming than a 747 crossing the Atlantic, and it managed to melt all of the chocolates on the biscuits. This, I feel, is not up to scratch.
An early start tomorrow, with the aim of being back at home by noon.
I had a great day today. I finally got my arse in gear and pushed myself to the train station to get the train to Nice.
It’s somehow touching to know that the problems we might have thought endemic to the English rail network on Sundays has at least a parallel in France. First of all I waited 15 minutes or so while two ticket booths dealt with two people. Neither, as far as I could see, wanted to change their nationality. It just appears to take 15 minutes to sell any kind of ticket at SNCF.
None of this annoyed me that much, although the Italians in front of me who wanted to catch a train to Milan were getting understandably vexed. My own train, however, was said to be a 15 minute retard. Before the two people waiting at the ticket booths for their transaction had seen their purchases completed, this delay had turned into 50 minutes, because the railways were “seriously perturbed”. Which is, I guess, what happens when the retards are in control.
It would have been oh-so-easy to give up and return to my hotel, but by now I had the bit between my teeth. This, dammit, was a challenge. I knew that the TAM100 bus went to Nice, so all I had to do was find a bus stop where it might stop. The TAM stops are different from the internal Monaco stops, and it took me a 25-minute walk to find one, but then a bus turned up within seconds.
The TAM110 to the airport (just past Nice) costs E16.60. I was therefore rather pleasantly surprised when I asked for a single to Nice to be told that it cot one euro. “To Nice?” enquired I. One euro it was. Bloody brilliant.
The bus trip gave the opportunity to see some of the towns between Monaco and Nice. Cap d’Ail has streets commemorating Beaverbrook and Churchill (must look up my biog of Beaverbrook to remind myself of the link that Max Aitken had with the place) while Beaulieu sur mer had a very “sub-Monaco” feel to it. Eze, which splits the two, was more to my liking, while Villefranche-sur-mer was beautiful.
Passing a 100 bus going in the opposite direction, I noted that it was considerably more crowded than the bus going into Nice.
But Nice, well, Nice is ace. Fell in love with the place, as simple as that. Following my nose, I walked up to the old castle, which is now a weird high-altitude gardens. This took up more than an hour, including a trip to the Jewish cemetery. Then I descended and went for a walk round the old village, which was packed, open, and busy. I treated myself to a yummy lemon ice-cream.
But on leaving the old town, passing a specialist Oyster restaurant and entering Grimaldi Square, the tow virtually shut, becoming a normal French Sunday. Most weird how the split was so absolute.
I made a quick visit to the Nice Museum of Contemporary Art, a small place on just two floors, featuring no more than a dozen artists. Alun Williams and Yves Klein were the artists that impressed me most. Klein appears to be something of a Nice hero.
Then, as is my wont, I continued my walking exploration. Nice has one tram route, ad the trams are fairly cool.
By now it was about 4.30 in the afternoon, so I decided to eat port-side. This is not to be confused with Port Said. I found a place that looked crowded, walked in, only to be met by a mélange of Australian and New Zealand accents. It was the Kookaburra. I had a superb squid and prawn salad, with the little things got right (tomatoes filleted of the inner seed part, for example). It was meant to be a sweet chili and fresh coriander dressing, but I thought that I detected Jan’s favourite trick, reduced balsamic vinegar. (Well, I did.)
The trip back was enlivened by, believe it or not, what the French would have assumed was an English nutter, since he was speaking and shouting in English. But, here’s the weird thing, he spoke rather poor English with a strong but hard-to-define accent. Russian? Polish? He left half-way along the route, thankfully, last heard screaming on the street. Madness.
I bumped into Daniel Zink on the way back (I had seen his twin brother this morning at breakfast) and asked him how he got on. Seventh, he said. Well, that’s a trousered E250k, which he said was by far his biggest win. He then said that he had bought in directly, which got me thinking. Joe Ebanks had also bought in for the 10k. Both cashed, but how much was that buy-in as a percentage of their entire bankroll? I wouldn’t mind betting that it was a good deal more than 5%. Given the large number of 10K direct buy-ins, either there are many more players with $250k bankroll floating around than I had previously thought, or too many players are directly buying in at levels rather higher than they should be.
A final whinge about this hotel, the one with an Internet connection slightly inferior to that some players said they had experienced in the Third World Poker Open in Somalia. I left some Petits Fours Patissiers on my desk in my “air-conditioned” room. What could go wrong? Well, the fridge underneath the desk, that’s what. It contributes more to global warming than a 747 crossing the Atlantic, and it managed to melt all of the chocolates on the biscuits. This, I feel, is not up to scratch.
An early start tomorrow, with the aim of being back at home by noon.
