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Chantez! Chante Clarette
Oct. 11th, 2010 09:57 pmIt rained this morning, quite hard, but by mid-afternoon it had stopped, so I executed a couple of strolls. Perhaps it was the cloud, but I took hardly any photographs today -- those that I did were mainly later on and "experiments with light", so to speak. And most of them were abject failures. Actually, that isn't true. Many of them were near-successes. It's so annoying when just one of the things goes wrong when you are taking a picture. At night, with so many variables, I seem to find that I fuck up the focusing - lol. One of the easiest bits.
One of my discoveries today was that the Nizzian alcoholic's tipple of choice, the equivalent of "Diamond White", as it were, is "Chante Clarette", an elegant little 11% Rosé or white wine that comes in a plastic bottle for about €1.70 a litre.
I also noticed what Roxanna, the lovely Rumanian girl who showed me the apartment, had muttered about with a kind of Victorian disapproval that I thought was the monopoly of the Germans. She said that there were now Sushi Bars everywhere. And she was right! "I prefer my fish cooked", she muttered darkly. For someone in her mid-20s, it was frightening how fluent she was in French and English (and, reputedly, Italian and Spanish). How do some people manage it?
A third thing I noticed was that one of the reasons I think I like Nice is the remarkable absence of sports fanaticism. Let's face it; in London it's hard to work out which is harder to avoid -- stuff about the latest Simon Cowell vehicle on Twitter; or stuff about football on Facebook.
Nice has very few sports bars. I only realized this when I happened to see one, and realized that it was the first one I had seen. Sports such as football and rugby are clearly left for the children in cities elsewhere. Even the Stade Ray, the home ground of Nice FC, struggles to attract crowds of five figures. Actually, in a moment of contrariness, I thought about seeing whether Nice FC was at home on Wednesday, so I could visit my first football game since 1972 (although, come to think of it, I did see a Nantes FC game in 1973).
On the Rue de France at night you get hawkers and buskers and panhandlers and all sorts trying to huckster a crust. There was a rather surreal moment/situation where a professional trio, including a violinist, were playing a jazzy-like number. Not 40 feet away was this tiny old lady - Edith Piaf would probably have had to go on a diet to match her weight -- who seemed to be playing her violin from a piece of sheet music. I attempted to hear what she was playing -- perhaps a bit of Mozart? By the time I got to withhin about five feet of her I could just about pick out the notes she was playing from those of the jazz ensemble behind me. It was at this point I realized why she was playing so close to the jazz trio. She was terrible. I mean, she couldn't really play a note. The sheet music was just a bluff, and clearly she reckoned that she might get some sympathy cash from people who thought the jazz band was drowning her out. Marvellous.
( pictures )
One of my discoveries today was that the Nizzian alcoholic's tipple of choice, the equivalent of "Diamond White", as it were, is "Chante Clarette", an elegant little 11% Rosé or white wine that comes in a plastic bottle for about €1.70 a litre.
I also noticed what Roxanna, the lovely Rumanian girl who showed me the apartment, had muttered about with a kind of Victorian disapproval that I thought was the monopoly of the Germans. She said that there were now Sushi Bars everywhere. And she was right! "I prefer my fish cooked", she muttered darkly. For someone in her mid-20s, it was frightening how fluent she was in French and English (and, reputedly, Italian and Spanish). How do some people manage it?
A third thing I noticed was that one of the reasons I think I like Nice is the remarkable absence of sports fanaticism. Let's face it; in London it's hard to work out which is harder to avoid -- stuff about the latest Simon Cowell vehicle on Twitter; or stuff about football on Facebook.
Nice has very few sports bars. I only realized this when I happened to see one, and realized that it was the first one I had seen. Sports such as football and rugby are clearly left for the children in cities elsewhere. Even the Stade Ray, the home ground of Nice FC, struggles to attract crowds of five figures. Actually, in a moment of contrariness, I thought about seeing whether Nice FC was at home on Wednesday, so I could visit my first football game since 1972 (although, come to think of it, I did see a Nantes FC game in 1973).
On the Rue de France at night you get hawkers and buskers and panhandlers and all sorts trying to huckster a crust. There was a rather surreal moment/situation where a professional trio, including a violinist, were playing a jazzy-like number. Not 40 feet away was this tiny old lady - Edith Piaf would probably have had to go on a diet to match her weight -- who seemed to be playing her violin from a piece of sheet music. I attempted to hear what she was playing -- perhaps a bit of Mozart? By the time I got to withhin about five feet of her I could just about pick out the notes she was playing from those of the jazz ensemble behind me. It was at this point I realized why she was playing so close to the jazz trio. She was terrible. I mean, she couldn't really play a note. The sheet music was just a bluff, and clearly she reckoned that she might get some sympathy cash from people who thought the jazz band was drowning her out. Marvellous.
( pictures )
