nice part ii + photos (late!)

I've been all over the place with my posts and this one will also be a bit unbalanced from my usual style, but c'est la vie!

Last week was the second week of Winter Break and as I mentioned last week, I was in Nice with H :) Thursday we spent the day in this cute little town nearby called St-Paul-de-Vence. Well actually we *walked* to this town from a train station. Since it was walking it was 1 hour and 40 minutes away by foot from the place we were trying to go. I don't know about you guys but that's kind of pushing the limits for me. Also there were hills o_o and no sidewalk for a good portion of the walk. But we made it there in one piece, although I was grumpy. The place we were trying to reach is a museum called La Fondation Maeght. It was actually a reallyyyy beautiful place so it was worth the walk in the end. In Nice there's a museum for Marc Chagall and the Fondation Maeght also had stuff by him (really getting my cultural education out here). Some of my favorite things to see are the mosaics and stained glass I would say. After, we visited the little town of St-Paul-de-Vence. It really reminded me of Mont-St-Michel in the sense that everything is going up and the stairs doing so are narrow and old and you have shops lining the way.

Friday was the last day we had since the travel back to Amiens would start bright and early the next morning. So Friday we just spent chilling out. I made sure to eat all the Nice specialties that I wanted before leaving and it was nice to sit on the beach and gaze a little bit. I was surprised because I didn't think I'd like the rocky beaches but actually it wasn't so bad at all. I could definitely appreciate lying out there in the summer :D This was overall a relaxing vacation and I feel ready to take on the next few weeks.

Now here comes a bunch of photos :) I'm gonna put the ones from my trips to Lille and Paris as well!

Lille

Saw this in the Musée de Picardie in Amiens which I finally was able to visit! I thought it was funny how the girl is cut out

Paris with Katie! We went to a cemetery and saw some famous graves such as those of Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, and Edith Piaf. We had yummy crêpes too! For any confusion on which Katie I'm talking about, here you are

Finally starting to see strawberries in the store and took advantage by making some chocostrawbs. Semi for valentine's day and semi because I love chocolate strawberries

And if you wanted to see the finished product from when I painted some pottery with Smaranda, I was able to pick up it when I visited Katie :) I'm actually very pleased with how it turned out

Views in Nice -- they have a cool waterfall and there were seriously so many good places to get a good view. Regarding the blue guy, I forgot to mention, but we happened to visit during the week they were having Carnaval festivities. With Covid, I wasn't really comfortable going somewhere where the crowd is the whole thing, but I think it was a good thing because other than summer, I think a lot of businesses close down off-season. So I have a feeling more were open bc of Carnaval. The blue guy was blocking off these cars and being goofy which the drivers probably didn't find very amusing but everyone watching did

Food! And yes I had to have gelato every day. I HAD TO!!!!

Art we saw :) the second pic (the long black post looking thing) was called Takis and it reminded me of Erin because she had just wrote about finding these rare Takis. The first two are of the gardens in Fondation Maeght.

We went to a photography museum and they were doing an expo about this specific photography studio that does portraits and look who I saw ;)

Since I haven't done my book of the week for past few weeks, I'll also catch up with those. I have been meeting my reading resolution goal! The others I've been more lax on, but hey, I can only focus focus on one thing so what are ya gonna do

Books of the Month - February

The Invisible Man by HG Wells (1897) - This was a short little science fiction story about, well you guessed it, an invisible man. It's this guy who discovers a chemical/physical way to become invisible and also learns it's not all fun and games. Since it's old and British, some of it was hard to understand but not too bad. The concept they explained behind the whole invisibility thing was interesting but some of the characters annoying.

Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018) - I watched the Hulu series of this book a year or so ago so I already knew a little going in. From what I remember, the series was actually quite faithful to the book! And I liked the book. I had to read it in French because that's what the library had, but it wasn't too bad. Makes you think about modern relationships and romances and all that jazz. Not in a cheesy way though (most of the time)

NW by Zadie Smith (2012) - I finished this one just today and it was really well written. I've heard the name Zadie Smith float about so I'm glad I got to give her a chance. This book is about four people in North west London. It means nothing to me when they say neighborhood names but oh well. Each section is written a little differently so when I started I found it harder to get into but by the end I was pretty invested.