Une Américaine à Redon: Nice (pronounced knee-ce) and the French Riviera

South of France, round 2!!
Wow so yes, I did go to the south again, but this time it was a trip organized by my program, STS (basically the french counterpart to CIEE). It was a crazy trip because I saw my friends from orientation again (after 5 months! what!?) and it felt like no time had passed, the only thing was that we were all a lot better at french than on that cold week in Lille in January. I also made new friends who are all people who have been here for a year. The trip started by me taking a train from Redon to Nantes on Tuesday, May 26th and then I met up with Conner and Ida, who took their train from Rennes. We all took the shuttle to the airport and sat for about 2 hours waiting to get on our plane. When we finally got on, it pretty much hit us that we were going to the French Riviera for a week and we got really excited and it kinda stayed like that for the rest of the trip. When we landed, we met up with Liz, another girl who came for a year and Georgia (!!) who was at my orientation. After our reunions, we all set off to find the shuttle, all talking loudly in English. So great. We waited for a while but the shuttle didn't seem to be coming, so we set out to find the train station (this was all to try to get to our hostel in the center of Nice). After Conner's several near-death experiences with Nice drivers, we finally got on the train. We rode it one stop and then had to get off. We still hadn't eaten lunch at this point, so we found a café and all sat down and ate lunch. While we were eating more people from our trip joined us until we were about 11 sitting around this little table in this café. We finally left to go to the hostel and we met up with one of our two supervisors, Muriel. She gave us our room assignments and we went off to unpack and settle in. Georgia and I were then joyously reunited with Kayla, Avery and Cole, our friends from the January orientation. When everyone else was introduced, we went off to the beach to check out the scene. The water was so inviting we almost jumped in fully dressed (but we didn't, haha)! We then had dinner at the hostel and stayed up late talking and catching up on the last 5 months, and our lives in general.
In the morning, we got up and had breakfast at the hostel. We set off for a walking tour of the Nice castle, well, it was more the remains of a castle! The only thing left was the foundations. It was on this very high hill and we got a great view of the city. We all got some great pictures and got to know our new friends better whilst sweating profusely climbing up maybe a million steps (I didn't count). It was a struggle climbing up all those steps, let me tell you. After we had finished the castle, Sophie and Muriel told us that we had the afternoon as free time and the only condition was that we had to be back at the hostel at 7 for dinner. We were thrilled at the prospect of a free afternoon in Nice. We all went back to the hostel, got our beach gear together and then went out to lunch. When we got to the beach, I'm pretty sure it took us about 2 minutes to get out of our clothes and into the water. There is no way to truly describe the water to someone who wasn't there but I will do my best. It was bright blue and warm and just perfect for swimming. Once we had gotten back from a little swimming excursion to some rocks, we went for a walk along the beach to check out what was going on. That was when we saw the sign that said: "Parasailing". Yes, you guessed it, we went parasailing over the Mediterranean!! We thought about it and decided that even though Sophie had warned us against drugs and alcohol, she never said anything about extreme sports being off limits. While I was up there, I just kept thinking, WOW I can't believe I'm here and doing this with my friends. It was an amazing feeling. After that thrill, we headed back to the hostel for showers and dinner. We stayed up again that night: Monaco tomorrow!
Thursday morning, we got up, had breakfast and rushed to our bus to Monaco. After about 45 minutes of beautiful Côte d'Azure (blue coast) scenery, we got to Monaco. We walk around for about 2 hours and just take in the interesting skyline of buildings before us that was so different from Nice. Let me say something about Monaco: its interesting to visit, but was really not my style. It felt fake. So I was happy to go and visit, but I don't know if I'll go back because it wasn't really the kind of thing that I like. Anyways, when we got back on the bus, we rode for about 30 minutes and then got off at a little town and had lunch and went to the beach! Victoria (a girl from Brazil) had brought her GoPro and so we had a lot of fun with that, taking silly underwater pictures!
We got back to Nice and wandered around a little bit before going out for our last dinner.
Woke up on Friday morning and packed up, said goodbye to the people who were't coming with us (Kayla, Avery, Georgia, Haley, Conner, Liz, Ida, Sophie and I) to the airport. I was super sad to leave my new friends, but I promised to come visit them in their various home countries as soon as possible.
At the airport I then said goodbye to my orientation friends. It was super sad, but at least they live in the US so I can see them soon. On our plane to Paris, it was Conner, Ida, Liz and I. We parted ways with Liz in Paris and then caught our train to Rennes. In Rennes, I cried saying goodbye to Ida, and then Conner, who both were not coming with me on my train to Redon. It was a great week, and I made some amazing friends who I can't wait to see again on my travels.

A bientôt!

Cecilia