Nice was beautiful. The weather was incredible, the beaches were amazing, and the parade was unbelievable.
It was so great to be in weather that didn't require fifteen different layers. Not that I should complain, the winter in the UK is way more mild than it has been for the kids at Skidmore.
This is the view from our hotel lobby, the Hotel Meyerbeer. It was a pretty nice place. Small, but perfectly nice, with a great location. They're website is pretty funny, and says things like "It is at that time that form celebrates it Promenade of the English takes."
This is the float of the king. Sadly, we spent the weekend thinking it would be this float that would go up in flames on the last night, but it was a more flammable duplicate already out in the ocean. Oh well.
The first parade we saw was the Flower Parade. It pretty much consisted of people dressed as floral things, and attractive women dressed as vaguely floral things, who would toss flowers to the parade-watchers.
One thing about Carnival that was interesting was the participation of the parade-watchers. Everywhere there were people selling "confetti bombs," which is what the french call Silly String. It was acceptable for the kids to target everything that passed them, be it floats or people. I hate silly string.
However, some of the people in the parade could retaliate. Some people had some strange gun-type things that would shoot pink streamers really far and fast, and they'd cover everything in their path! Yeah!
Of course, what's a flower parade without some half naked women? I really like this guy in the above photo. Not only is he acting like he doesn't care that a lady is dancing seductively next to him, but he also pretends not to notice the bright pink streamer on his neck. Keep it going, man. If you believe hard enough, maybe we will too.
The next evening, we saw the Light Parade!
The night parade is apparently the same as the day parade, except cooler, because they make things glow.
So much of this parade had the "what the hell?" factor going on. Why was there a strange chicken/politics/
This was probably my favorite float. All of the floats were based on drawings made by talented European cartoonists I had never heard of, and this one stayed the closest to the cartoony style. It also has really cool movement, the arm moved pretty realistically!
A lot of the floats were characatures of French political figures. So I'm srue this image as one of them with the body of a horse would be pretty hilarious to people who actually know things about french politics.
Enter the creepiest floats in the parade. I don't know what they were, these creepy ghost-like, flesh-and-muccus-toned creatures, but they scared me a lot.
Other creepy things: I was attacked by gaint floating hands. They really creeped me out, and I remember thinking to myself "They're attacking people. I really hope they don't attack me." But they did. I was also attacked by a giant chicken. I took a video of it attacking people, hopefully I can get it on youtube at some point.
Chickens?
I mainly took this photo to prove that we really were in the middle of all this craziness.
The next day, Chester and I went to a very intense allpshellfish restuarant. It was an experience, we split a huge platter of different kinds of shrip, sea-snail creatures, crab, clams, oysters, and lord knows what else. Although it was an experience, both Chester and I ended up getting sick from it.
We did, however, go on an amazing "hike" up a lot of stairs, with an incredible view of the coastline.
more later....
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