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peterbirksOn the evening of my trip to Menton I masochistically went for a walk around Nice, not for any real reason except, perhaps, to experiment with the camera.
This was an 8 second exposure f6.7 after adjustment for white balance. The problem with 8 second exposures is that it's quite difficult to stand still for that long (how did early Victorian photographers manage with these 30 second exposures!). One tends to "sway". This is more noticeable with side-on pictures, for which I can't even seem to keep motionless for even three seconds.
Six seconds, f5.6 18mm lens. The central hill.
Three second exposure f5.6 40mm. Two oddities about this picture, which I only really put in here to display those oddities (it's a gross failure as a photograph). One is that in this picture I appear to be putting in my application for sainthood (that or I have just had a very good idea). The second is that you might be able to detect some hints of red on my face. This is where I caught the sun, except that, the longer the exposure and the darker the surroundings, the more pronounced the red becomes. I suspect that this is some kind of quirk of .jpg and that, if I were processing in RAW (something I may try when I retire, but for now life is too short), the anomaly would go away.
+++++++
The following day I spent a long time writing up the previous day trip to Menton (those thumbnails on the map took forever! Not a worthwhile experiment, I fear), a little while playing poker, and, generally speaking, just faffing about. This meant that I didn't get going until 3.30 in the afternoon. I'd planned to complete the second "half" of the sentier littoral between Nice and Villefranche, but I couldn't find it! And, although it's clearly indicated on the map on the coastal walk, Google Maps (perhaps out of date?) shows no evidence of it on the map or satellite, even though the first half of the walk is quite distinct.
So I resorted to plan B, a walk round Cap Ferrat. I had to wait quite a while for the bus, which meant that I didn't actually start the walk until 5.15pm. After the previous day I reckoned this would be little more than a stroll. In fact it's a bit further than that, and I wasn't to catch the bus back until gone 7pm.
I'm glad that I made the Cap Ferrat walk last September, before it became sanitized.
However, the most surreal moment of this tour came after seeing hardly anyone (most people make the walk in the morning, I guess) bar a couple of Japanese tourists who ostentatiously ducked into an alcove as I approached, presumably because they felt that the four-foot wide path would have entailed too much physical proximity to a westerner.
I then encountered a couple on two Brompton bikes. Yes, you read me correctly. Of course, when I say "on", I exaggerate. They were pushing them. I could have told them there and then that they might as well fold them up now, because they weren't going to be doing any more riding on THIS trip, no sir.
Perhaps they had seen the route on Google Maps and had assumed that it would all be something like this:
whereas in fact they would be more likely to come across steps, or a track like this (i.e., a bike rather more suited to off-road than a Brompton):
That said, the most "worrying" bit of the whole walk was probably this section below:
Compare that with THIS picture from last September.
... which was one of several sections where failure to pay attention could lead to a rapid exit from this mortal earth.
It was nice taking this trip when it was so quiet. I really think that it's one of the most beautiful walks that I have experienced. It's certainly one of the few that can make me feel that, maybe, the world isn't so bad after all.
However, it was a bit freaky to be told by my phone, as I sat down here, with no land between me and Corsica, that an open WiFi network was available. It was, of course, the restaurant at the end of the Cape, which you can't really see from the walk.
General Montgomery Birks is ready and prepared to repel the Corsican invasion.
But first, a bit of a rest.
By the time I got back to the bus stop at Port Jean, it was well on the way to dark. There was another pleasantly surreal moment when, as I waited for the number 81, a conversation began just out of my sight between a couple of English speakers. One of them appeared to want some money, and the other one appeared to be drunk. The owee had a slight Australian accent, while the ower was posh English. After about five minutes of this I felt like popping my head around the corner of the bus stop and saying (given my long experience of poker nippers and the like): "Forget it, mate, you aren't going to get a penny out of this man. Write it off." The ower was using all of the tricks, including disputing whether 12 days qualified as "a week overdue" or "two weeks overdue", changing his story from one minute to the next, saying that the world was too obsessed with money, saying that in his time a man's handshake was his bond, etc etc. But, when it came down to it, he was clearly skint and was not going to come up with the cash.
Eventually I caught sight of the pair, and the guy who owed the money had the badly swollen legs of what looked to me like alcohol-exacerbated diabetes. The younger Australian guy was on a rather throaty motor-bike.
What was sad about this was that it kind of shattered the myth of Cap Ferrat as an idle playground of the retired rich. Just like the myth that all of the gays in Soho are rich professionals with money to burn (whereas most are probably skint from the expensive lifestyle that comes with being a central London scene gay) it suddenly became clear that the pricey lifestyle that comes with living in a place like Port Jean had quite likely denuded many a retiree's wealth to the level of genteel poverty. But the image must be maintained! Oh dear.
When I got back to the flat I went to turn on my monitor to check my emails, but it wouldn't work. I was a bit worried that I might have left it on for too long one night (when it was face-down to the table). So I unplugged it and left it to cool down for a while. An hour later I plugged it back in and -- BANG!-- fireworks from the back. One dead monitor, no doubt about it. I'm not sure if it overheated or if it's a voltage thing. However, I'd used the monitor twice previously (in Nice and in Rome) without an adaptor and without a problem.
Oh well, I thought, that probably ends any online poker for the week. First I get shafted by Full Tilt and Party, and then my monitor gives up on me.
+++++
I slept horrifically last night, probably because I went to bed too early. But nearly every day this week I've found it hard to get going before midday -- by which time, of course, any chance of a "long" day trip is out of the window.
However, after finding the four (small) poker tables on the netbook too difficult to work with the previous evening, I decided to give "stacking" a go. This is where, instead of tiling the tables, you just lay them on top of each other and wait for the table where your action is required to pop to the front.
This is very different from tiling, and I don't think that I could work it on a large screen (too many other distractions). But for a Netbook it's superb. I was quickly up to seven tables, and the lack of "unnecessary" distraction meant that one could focus just on one's action NOW, rather than on what was happening on another table where I had just acted. The downside to this is that your play becomes even more player-independent. The upside is that you can crack through tables far more quickly. And the reduced mouse-movement is an added bonus.
I managed to get going by 12.10pm, so I determined to make it to Keisuke Matsushima for lunch.
As I noted in March, this restaurant doesn't go out of its way to advertise itself. Although it's on the Rue de France, it's away from the main restaurant thoroughfare, stuck between a shuttered old mobile phone shop and, er, a pharmacy I think.
This was the menu that I chose:
I picked the girolles with a soft-boiled egg, followed by the milles-feulles beef with what the restaurant called wasabi, but which I think of as tempura. The dessert was the one at the top of the list, a magnificent confection of sorbet, orange, a chocolate madeleine and other stuff.
With sparkling water and coffee the bill came to 54 euro before service. That's probably about what I would expect to pay for something of similar quality in London.
But is it a Michelin Star contender? I fear not. That this is considered one of the better restaurants in Nice is something of a comment on how British cooking has grown in stature in the past 20 years. I can think of a dozen restaurants in the City (never mind the West End) where I could get a meal this good for roughly the same price. Anima (v near where Mikey works) is one that springs immediately to mind. That's not to criticize Keisuke Matsushima. Credit where credit is due. It steps outside traditional French boundaries and offers a selection of dishes you would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere in Nice. It was moderately busy (the restaurant is only about 36 covers) for a Thursday lunchtime, and I was the only tourist. I came away from the meal feeling that I had eaten something good, but not blow-my-mind outstanding.
That said, I might have chosen the wrong main course, as a couple of the other tables seemed to have been served some very tasty looking lamb.
+++++++++++
This was an 8 second exposure f6.7 after adjustment for white balance. The problem with 8 second exposures is that it's quite difficult to stand still for that long (how did early Victorian photographers manage with these 30 second exposures!). One tends to "sway". This is more noticeable with side-on pictures, for which I can't even seem to keep motionless for even three seconds.
Six seconds, f5.6 18mm lens. The central hill.
Three second exposure f5.6 40mm. Two oddities about this picture, which I only really put in here to display those oddities (it's a gross failure as a photograph). One is that in this picture I appear to be putting in my application for sainthood (that or I have just had a very good idea). The second is that you might be able to detect some hints of red on my face. This is where I caught the sun, except that, the longer the exposure and the darker the surroundings, the more pronounced the red becomes. I suspect that this is some kind of quirk of .jpg and that, if I were processing in RAW (something I may try when I retire, but for now life is too short), the anomaly would go away.
+++++++
The following day I spent a long time writing up the previous day trip to Menton (those thumbnails on the map took forever! Not a worthwhile experiment, I fear), a little while playing poker, and, generally speaking, just faffing about. This meant that I didn't get going until 3.30 in the afternoon. I'd planned to complete the second "half" of the sentier littoral between Nice and Villefranche, but I couldn't find it! And, although it's clearly indicated on the map on the coastal walk, Google Maps (perhaps out of date?) shows no evidence of it on the map or satellite, even though the first half of the walk is quite distinct.
So I resorted to plan B, a walk round Cap Ferrat. I had to wait quite a while for the bus, which meant that I didn't actually start the walk until 5.15pm. After the previous day I reckoned this would be little more than a stroll. In fact it's a bit further than that, and I wasn't to catch the bus back until gone 7pm.
I'm glad that I made the Cap Ferrat walk last September, before it became sanitized.
However, the most surreal moment of this tour came after seeing hardly anyone (most people make the walk in the morning, I guess) bar a couple of Japanese tourists who ostentatiously ducked into an alcove as I approached, presumably because they felt that the four-foot wide path would have entailed too much physical proximity to a westerner.
I then encountered a couple on two Brompton bikes. Yes, you read me correctly. Of course, when I say "on", I exaggerate. They were pushing them. I could have told them there and then that they might as well fold them up now, because they weren't going to be doing any more riding on THIS trip, no sir.
Perhaps they had seen the route on Google Maps and had assumed that it would all be something like this:
whereas in fact they would be more likely to come across steps, or a track like this (i.e., a bike rather more suited to off-road than a Brompton):
That said, the most "worrying" bit of the whole walk was probably this section below:
Compare that with THIS picture from last September.
... which was one of several sections where failure to pay attention could lead to a rapid exit from this mortal earth.
It was nice taking this trip when it was so quiet. I really think that it's one of the most beautiful walks that I have experienced. It's certainly one of the few that can make me feel that, maybe, the world isn't so bad after all.
However, it was a bit freaky to be told by my phone, as I sat down here, with no land between me and Corsica, that an open WiFi network was available. It was, of course, the restaurant at the end of the Cape, which you can't really see from the walk.
General Montgomery Birks is ready and prepared to repel the Corsican invasion.
But first, a bit of a rest.
By the time I got back to the bus stop at Port Jean, it was well on the way to dark. There was another pleasantly surreal moment when, as I waited for the number 81, a conversation began just out of my sight between a couple of English speakers. One of them appeared to want some money, and the other one appeared to be drunk. The owee had a slight Australian accent, while the ower was posh English. After about five minutes of this I felt like popping my head around the corner of the bus stop and saying (given my long experience of poker nippers and the like): "Forget it, mate, you aren't going to get a penny out of this man. Write it off." The ower was using all of the tricks, including disputing whether 12 days qualified as "a week overdue" or "two weeks overdue", changing his story from one minute to the next, saying that the world was too obsessed with money, saying that in his time a man's handshake was his bond, etc etc. But, when it came down to it, he was clearly skint and was not going to come up with the cash.
Eventually I caught sight of the pair, and the guy who owed the money had the badly swollen legs of what looked to me like alcohol-exacerbated diabetes. The younger Australian guy was on a rather throaty motor-bike.
What was sad about this was that it kind of shattered the myth of Cap Ferrat as an idle playground of the retired rich. Just like the myth that all of the gays in Soho are rich professionals with money to burn (whereas most are probably skint from the expensive lifestyle that comes with being a central London scene gay) it suddenly became clear that the pricey lifestyle that comes with living in a place like Port Jean had quite likely denuded many a retiree's wealth to the level of genteel poverty. But the image must be maintained! Oh dear.
When I got back to the flat I went to turn on my monitor to check my emails, but it wouldn't work. I was a bit worried that I might have left it on for too long one night (when it was face-down to the table). So I unplugged it and left it to cool down for a while. An hour later I plugged it back in and -- BANG!-- fireworks from the back. One dead monitor, no doubt about it. I'm not sure if it overheated or if it's a voltage thing. However, I'd used the monitor twice previously (in Nice and in Rome) without an adaptor and without a problem.
Oh well, I thought, that probably ends any online poker for the week. First I get shafted by Full Tilt and Party, and then my monitor gives up on me.
+++++
I slept horrifically last night, probably because I went to bed too early. But nearly every day this week I've found it hard to get going before midday -- by which time, of course, any chance of a "long" day trip is out of the window.
However, after finding the four (small) poker tables on the netbook too difficult to work with the previous evening, I decided to give "stacking" a go. This is where, instead of tiling the tables, you just lay them on top of each other and wait for the table where your action is required to pop to the front.
This is very different from tiling, and I don't think that I could work it on a large screen (too many other distractions). But for a Netbook it's superb. I was quickly up to seven tables, and the lack of "unnecessary" distraction meant that one could focus just on one's action NOW, rather than on what was happening on another table where I had just acted. The downside to this is that your play becomes even more player-independent. The upside is that you can crack through tables far more quickly. And the reduced mouse-movement is an added bonus.
I managed to get going by 12.10pm, so I determined to make it to Keisuke Matsushima for lunch.
As I noted in March, this restaurant doesn't go out of its way to advertise itself. Although it's on the Rue de France, it's away from the main restaurant thoroughfare, stuck between a shuttered old mobile phone shop and, er, a pharmacy I think.
This was the menu that I chose:
I picked the girolles with a soft-boiled egg, followed by the milles-feulles beef with what the restaurant called wasabi, but which I think of as tempura. The dessert was the one at the top of the list, a magnificent confection of sorbet, orange, a chocolate madeleine and other stuff.
With sparkling water and coffee the bill came to 54 euro before service. That's probably about what I would expect to pay for something of similar quality in London.
But is it a Michelin Star contender? I fear not. That this is considered one of the better restaurants in Nice is something of a comment on how British cooking has grown in stature in the past 20 years. I can think of a dozen restaurants in the City (never mind the West End) where I could get a meal this good for roughly the same price. Anima (v near where Mikey works) is one that springs immediately to mind. That's not to criticize Keisuke Matsushima. Credit where credit is due. It steps outside traditional French boundaries and offers a selection of dishes you would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere in Nice. It was moderately busy (the restaurant is only about 36 covers) for a Thursday lunchtime, and I was the only tourist. I came away from the meal feeling that I had eaten something good, but not blow-my-mind outstanding.
That said, I might have chosen the wrong main course, as a couple of the other tables seemed to have been served some very tasty looking lamb.
+++++++++++
