Lazing on the Cote d'Azur

Bonjour!
Parlez-vous anglais?
Oui?
Merci beaucoup!

3 days in Nice and I'm practically French!

But I get ahead of myself...
We finished up our tour in Madrid. Perhaps next time, we would do it a little differently, but we definitely enjoyed ourselves in Spain, Morocco and Portugal :)

Sangria and tapas in a food market in central Madrid (mostly sangria for Stuart).

I think Madrid and Seville were my favourite parts of this part of our trip. Probably because we explored a good part of these ourselves. Stu really like Portugal - he even loved the seafood dinners, even though he doesn't eat seafood (getting to smash crabs helped, as did the copious amounts of port!).

From Madrid, we headed to Nice, where we have spent the last few days. My friend Clare (from Canterbury PhD days) is an astornomer in Nice, and has been looking after us :)

Clare and I up at the observatory, Nice in the background.

We have been up to the observatory for fantastic views of Nice, walked around the old city and up and down the promenade, headed up to the tiny old village of Eze (with tiny winding streets perched up on a steep hill), eaten crepes and croissants and icecream, swam in the Mediterranean, wanderred the gardens at the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild .... all absolutely fabulous!

Eze

the shoes, made of shoe-laces, Clare and I bought in Eze.

tea time at the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild

looking over the gardens at at the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild .

Clare and Stu at the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild .

Clare had to leave us today, but it was awesome to spend a couple of days with her :) We have a couple more days here, staying in her apartment in inner Nice. We managed to buy ourselves a GPS unit today, with our limited French (and the French people's limited English - they let you flounder for a few minutes before they decide to speak to you in their perfect English [after initially telling you they only speak a "little" English]!).

Tomorrow, we will likely head to Monacco. Maybe even try our luck at the Casino! We won 2.10 euro in the european lottery with the one line ticket we bought, so our luck is high! (ok we probably wont go to the casino, cos it's a 10 euro entry fee, and we dont have fancy enough clothes, but we'll look at it from the outside!)

Au revoir!