Ste. Paul-de-Vence & Nice

Cours Mirabeau, Aix,  on the way to the bus stop, 6:30 on a misty morning

Nice was always appearing, but never making the top of my list of places to go next. I had imagined, at some point, driving over the Menton line to Italy for lunch one day, then on the way back taking a few days to see places old and new, which might include Nice. But then Anna2, as someone else named her, mentioned there was a massive brocante every Monday and while I'm not in the market for anything, Mondays can be dull days anyway, so a plan began to form.

Hotels, if priced correctly for this pensioner, are appealing right now, as they're more flexible about arrival and departure times, not to mention, holding luggage. I wish I were more like my very well-traveled and resourceful friend who will walk into any hotel, whether she's staying there or not, and ask them to hold her luggage, but alas, I imagine being yelled at in French for my audacity. So my modus operandi was to check Priceline to get a lay of the land, then make a  refundable reservation directly with a hotel. The day before, prices had decreased considerably, leading to a most satisfactory outcome at the Windsor Hotel, where I would stay again, if only to be able to ask for and drop off the room key, Wes Anderson style. 

Speaking of pensioners, taking my first FlixBus brought about, I'm not going to lie, some agita that was really PTSD borne out of a mistakenly booked  trip through Luton instead of Heathrow on Ryan Air instead of Air France. The many additional hours of travel and waiting were distressing, the four different kinds of conveyance exasperating, but finding out that Ryan Air has a different definition of carry-on size put me over the edge. I felt old and stupid, as though the rules were changing under my nose and I couldn't quite keep up. Although maybe a better analogy is that kid no one liked, who changed the rules of a game to suit himself, mid game. But FlixBux proved solid, the twenty somethings and I arrived at Nice airport without incident, and there's honestly not a bad thing even this grouchy old codger can say about the experience.

Wannas, my Tunisian Uber driver, pulled up minutes later, immediately earning himself a hefty tip by lying that my French was superb. A chatter for sure, every Tunisian I've ever met (all four of them) has been incredibly warm and friendly. Wannas told me that Nice was “top” and Ste. Paul was “top”, my new favorite French word, making his way to become my best friend until he started trashing Marseille, which brought about an awkward silence that we both forgot about after a minute. He dropped me at the top of a steep hill, textured with olive and conical cypress trees, eucalyptus, vineyards, large stucco houses with terra cotta roofs and swimming pools a color between Virgin Mary blue and a washed out green. Such a feast for the eyes.

View down from the hill adjoining Fondation Maeght, Ste. Paul

​Have we had this chat about the Gardner Museum before? We may have, so feel free to skip this paragraph if it's starting to sound familiar. It was a wonderful place to be, led by a woman named Anne whom I was convinced channeled Mrs. Gardner. She had a white dog the size of a sweet potato that she’d sometimes hide in her large handbag, due to the “No Dogs” policy she had approved. Once, she sprinkled shiny stars and hearts over all of our desks after we’d left for the day, and another time asked a significant donor to fund milk and (homemade from the cafe) cookies every Friday for the staff. Late into my tenure, she got the leadership team latched on to this idea of the Program for Creativity, which would mirror Mrs Gardner’s salon, famous for gathering thinkers, painters, musicians, writers. After a painful amount of deliberation, an initial group was invited to converge for some weeks, all with a focus on chairs. Participants included the Eames grandsons, a talented but high maintenance South Asian photographer, an Italian curator of furniture and a documentary film maker. Perhaps there was someone else as well. The idea was to see what happened if they were left to their shared devices.  At the end, there was talk about a film, which I never saw. High-maintenance photographer did make a small and beautiful accordion book on thick paper of black and white photographs of chairs and shadows. Hmm, what happened to that book? I bought one at what was at the time great expense. The other "creation" was that in the salon of the museum, the normally tidily pushed in chairs were left pulled away from the table, as though a meal had just ended and everyone had just left for the smoking room. Underwhelming, from my perspective.  There may have been one other PFC, as we called it, that followed, but the initiative was put to bed as it proved too logistically challenging. How does a museum budget for a creative collaboration? How many security guards should be scheduled and when? How were important conservation guidelines communicated and ensured they were adhered to when a meeting might take place at 11:30 pm on a Sunday in the Courtyard where no one is supposed to be? So that was the end of a really lovely idea. 

You'd be reasonable wondering why I'm going on about this. Well, to start with, I just finished reading a David Sedaris book, and if there's one writer who gives license to jumping from one seemingly unrelated topic to another, it's him. But the PFC was resident in my head for much of my visit to the spectacular Fondation Maeght, where Wannas had dropped me. Founded by a couple who lost their son (as had the Gardners), they were counseled to do something creative, so gathered artists you’ve heard of who were all living nearby, to have them collaborate on the design of the buildings, grounds, interior accessories and of course, create the art to give everything life. After the construction was finished, performers of different sorts came to use the space and during their lifetime, remained a vibrant creative community. I could easily imagine a group of them having a picnic on the construction site, lying on their sides with heads on hands, throwing ideas around after many bottles of rosé. The Maeght is a PFC that worked brilliantly. Perhaps necessary ingredients are an inexhaustible bank account, many good connections and a large dose of French sunshine. It was one of my favorite visits in a long long time, as much for the feeling of the group spirit as for the actual art. 
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Entry courtyard, Fondation Maeght, Ste. Paul

Miro sculpture labrynth, Maeght, Ste. Paul

Miro labyrinth. There was a lot of Miro. Maeght, Ste. Paul

Giacometti door handles, Maeght, Ste. Paul

St. Bernard chapel, named for the Maeght's lost son. Chairs and some of the stations of the cross created by Braques

Oh gosh, I've forgotten who painted this but I love it. Maeght, Ste. Paul

Joan Mitchell, Maeght, Ste. Paul

Forgotten but love also . Maeght, Ste. Paul

Giacometti, lots of evidence of him. Maeght, Ste. Paul

​I may be functionally incapable when in a new place, of following through on an original intention, distracted and pulled away as I do tend to get, but it often results in a nice surprise. But not always. Meaning to get on the bus to head back to the airport where I would switch to a train that would take me to the station at Nice Ville, I was lured by a  hill I knew to be Ste. Paul-de-Vence not so far away, and being a bit peckish, was easily diverted. But after choosing a panini to order off the menu at an outdoor cafe and being barked at that paninis couldn't be ordered at the table and couldn't be eaten there (and this is March, imagine how acerbic he'll be in August!), I got a bad taste in my mouth which only got worse as I realized SP-d-V was yet another hilltop village with no soul, filled with restaurants and stores selling home goods. It made me think that maybe I shouldn't have been so appalled when in Tuscany, my sulky at the time 13- year old daughter whined "How many hills with churches are we going to go to?". Or as a lifetime Stockbridge resident said about his town, "I can't even buy a. hammer here." Aix is as far as I'm willing to go down that road.
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Bar where I waited for my ToGo panini. I did enjoy its old school charm that included bottles at least 50 years old.

OK, the paving was nice too. Ste. Paul-de-Vence

And then it was on to the Massena neighborhood of Nice, which like the nice parts of the hostile bar in Ste. Paul-de-Vence, is old school. There were beautiful buildings, sometimes wide boulevards but also smaller streets, many of which had islands stretching the block, separating cars from bikes, and sporting every kind of lush tropical plant you can imagine. I love a palm tree and there were plenty, as well as lemon trees, in fact the day I arrived was the last of the two week Lemon Festival in nearby Menton, as well as the last day of Nice Carnaval, which judging from the barriers and amount of stadium seating, must have been a pretty big affair. Aix had its own, and it was sweet, going all out for the kids, with day long activities that included making hats, decorating hats, a bit of face painting and pirates roaming the crowd. As adults, we sat at a cafe and drank. My favorite part of Carnaval is the few days following, when even the super efficient street cleaners haven't yet been able to vacuum up all the confetti and you see little colored pieces of paper all over the ground.

Carnaval float, Moby Dick was the theme, Aix

An octopus that played music, Aix

Old school, Nice

I could live here, but I'd probably change those plantings in the front, Nice

This is the vibe in Nice, classic old places next to newer apartment buildings. It somehow works.

The brocante was interesting, as much for the populace as anything for sale, though there were many beautiful travel posters from the sixties I could have easily bought. There were a bunch of old and even older men who one could tell spent significant time there, engaging vendors who knew that nothing would come out of the transaction and had work to do. Others browsing, funny that it was almost all men, reminded me of a certain place in the US where spares, or second sons of families with many things to inherit, go to live their lives of financial ease and ennui, peppered with a mental or emotional challenge. I'm thinking specifically about a guy I saw at the brocante who had orange pants on, a wool olive green vest and white pressed shirt that my first husband, who certainly fits into that category, would have worn, hand made leather shoes, hair almost to his shoulders that had been colored from dark brown to an orangy color, flipped into a situation that had hairpins and reminded me of Guillermo Vilas in the 1970s. He had a small, brown poodle that he attended aggressively.

This is the best I can find in the archives, it was much weirder.

From there it was a climb up a steep hill to the Matisse Museum, which took me first to the Gardens of the Cimiez Monastery and then to the actual Monastery, both could not have been more beautiful or serene. The Matisse Museum was crowded with Italian students who, let's just say, weren't the quietest, and perhaps took away even less than I from the visit. 

Steep march up to the Matisse Museum, Nice

Daffodils, the international herald of spring, Cimiez Gardens, Nice

Did you know that in Nice you can have lunch at a restaurant actually on the beach? A nice man in a white and blue striped T shirt brought me sardines, a little roll of French butter, some toasted baguette for the sardines, but dear to my heart, a brown bag of fresh baguette as well. Ordering a side green salad, I for some reason pictured one similar to what Pizzeria Uno might serve, in a brown bowl made to look like wood, with watery iceberg, pink tomatoes and white zinfandel dressing. What came was a ceramic bowl of the most recently picked greens, pungent olive oil and little else. The whole situation was heavenly, so I sat there on that beach thinking how incredibly lucky I was to be having the day I was having. 

Lunch sitch

Boardwalk life

On my last day, I walked down to the other end of the boardwalk and found the port, where French is not spoken and apparently all ex-pats live,. I also discovered the tourist nexus, a few alleys with ice cream shops and Lordy knows what else. It was a cluster. But right down on the harbor, I fell upon a grizzled man cutting up sea urchins, or orsins as they're called here. I have a memory of my father buying them for us when I was a child in Cassis, and while I've enjoyed them as uni in Japanese food, I'd not tried them out of the shell since way back. This man gave me 12, pointed to a curb with a low table, and there I sat with a small plastic spoon, scooping out their deliciousness. Would order them again in a heartbeat.

Tastu lunch

True to form, I had moments when convinced that I should move to Nice, there was much more going on, it's more of a city but not quite as overwhelming as Marseille. And we all know I love a beach and a palm tree. But as always, despite it having been a great few days, as soon as I got off the bus and was back in Aix, my heart was happy. 

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