today we are going to italy!

hey hey
marseille has come and gone, and we are leaving Nice in about an hour, but before that i figured i'd catch up a little with this.

lisa and i both liked marseille a lot and thought it was very pretty! i will grant that there are a lot of sketchy areas, and i definitely would not want to go there alone if i was a girl (all along the streets men just hang out and oogle and theres usually no girls around except for other ones walking by... its creepy even for me), but the scenery is amazing and they have a lovely old port area, some nice beaches, and cool islands in the port area.

we visited the two islands on an awesome ferry boat, Ile d'If (known for the fortress/prison on it) and Ile Frioul (we went to a beach in a little cove) and had a nice day doing that, followed by a night of beers and laundry. go us!

the next day we went to the city beach because the lovely calanques close at 11 in the morning to keep the crowds off (and we definitely slept past 11). after that, i took lisa on a wild goose chase up a mountain, down the other side, and up another mountain to reach a church that is perched on top of a 150m mountain overlooking the old port area and all of marseille really. the view was spectacular, and i'm glad we walked even though it was so hot out.

at night we went to see transformers, assuming incorrectly that it would be english with subtitles like the other 2 movies we saw in foreign places. its a good thing it was an action movie or else it would have been pretty boring, but we follozed along pretty well and the giant robots are sweet! "MOI, OPTIMUS PRIME!" haha!

we took the train to nice on thursday and got here in the early afternoon. we had a pretty slow day, just lunging around and wandering a bit and checking out the beach. the next day we went to the beach and tried to keep the momentum going to go out at night but i had to take a nap at 7 and once i woke up i was a total zombie, so even though we split a bottle of wine and went out it was subpar. on saturday we took a train to monte carlo and checked out the glorious riches of the wealthiest country in the world... the scene outside of the casino there is pretty ridiculous! there are the sweetest cars you would ever want to see... and where else could you see two ferraris pass each other in a hairpin turn? je ne sais pas.

i hate to be cliché but the best zord to describe Nice is that its nice. there is a nice beach, nice pedestrian streets and nice cafes and restaurants everywhere! our hotel turned out to be really nice (i love AC), 100m from the beach and in between the Armani and Louis Vuitton stores, and across the street from Chanel. that made lisa happy!

when we got back from monaco yesterday lisa went shopping while i found internet and tried to figure out my tuition for the fall. it is confusing! then, we got ready to go out, drank the beer that was chilling in our private fridge, and found a cool little club in old nice playing some good beats. we managed to get 2 for 1 coronas and free t shirts! go us!

today we are not hungover (yay!) and we just had a picnic lunch in a park by the beach. in about 3 minutes we're going to go back to our hotel, grab our stuff and then hop on a train to Milan! we are going to be over our heads with italian but it's been done before so i'm sure the language thing won't be too big of a problem.

au revoir! only 2 weeks left for me, woah!

simon