Friday 3rd September 2010.

By 5pm it was nice and cool in Nice! So off I went to the old town. As I said previously Nice was built by the Italians and styled on Torino so there would have to be porticos, wouldn’t there? There are!

And winding little streets and lane ways and little restaurants and shops and then big open squares. Very pretty, in a dilapidated way. Where the promenade is big and clean and shiny and impressive, the old town is dark and cramped with shutters falling down and paint peeling but in spite of its age and condition, still beautiful. In fact, more beautiful because it seems real, somehow. Again, like the cobblestones peeping through an ugly pothole, the beauty and history of these buildings peeps through the shutters and paint.

Later when Denis had finished work I collected him and we went back to the old town for dinner. We picked a place beside a fountain in a little square. When he came to take our order the waiter seemed distracted or bored and I wasn’t sure he had understood our French. He hadn’t! He was a stereotypical French waiter with handlebar mustache and lots of sighing. He arrived back with three starters for us (we’d ordered two – promise!), so we called him back, and if he wasn’t bored before he certainly was now. But he took it away and we got down to eating happily. But when the bill came we noticed we’d been charged for three meals and an extra desert. By now we though that maybe we were in a hidden camera program and a French presenter was going to jump out from behind the fountain. So we called a different waiter and explained that we hadn’t and couldn’t have eaten all that. No problem, he sorted it and our original waiter came back, with perfect English, to apologise for the mistake! I’m still convinced we’re going to get a call from French TV.

Ps while we were eating we spotted an actor from the soap, Coronation Street, we took a picture so you can see him for yourselves.