more about Nice
02.24.10
This is from the Carneval parade. Yeah, you could get that close. They took a night off from it last night as witnessed by the fact that things are quiet.
Yesterday I took the train des Pignes from Nice to Digne-les-Bains. If you’ve read Les Miserables, you’ll have heard of this place. If you haven’t, then possibly not. At the start, a bishop who was truly a man of God in the way that few enough of the 18th century bishops were, gave Jean Valjean a second chance by shielding him from the police at the time after the theft of, I think, a candlestick. The bishop lived in Digne.
Digne is, I think, the county capital of Alpes Hautes Provence. I’ve never been there before. A few years ago I spent some time in Saint André les Alpes checking out the Gorge du Verdon, a criminally under-rated canyon – I’ve seen it described as Europe’s equivalent of the Grand Canyon. There’s a road around it that you can drive but which only appears on the departmental maps – you will not find it on the Michelin South of France map because it’s smaller than the average boreen. I think you’re only allowed drive around it in one direction too and the road is definitely narrower than the average Ring of Kerry. I had done the train trip through the mountains from Saint Andre to Nice the last time round, but that was during September and it was still basically summer. This time I’d a yen to see what it was like around there without the desire to drive around there as I wasn’t too sure what condition the roads might be in. The train journey is 35E odd return and it is slow. The trip to Digne takes a little over three hours. It’s one of those little local trains that I particularly associate with France and this one is special because it’s a narrow gauge (1 metre instead of 1.4 metres) and it is not operated by the SNCF, but by the Chemins de Fer de Provence.
Chemins de Fer de Provence used to have a very grand station in reasonably central Nice. I blogged about it in a past life; at the time, it was derelict with only pigeons inhabiting the innards of a building with a very fine and beautiful facade but little else to recommend it. You’d wonder how such dereliction could happen in a town as wealthy as Nice. The problem is no one is entirely sure what to do with it. Since I was last here, the main part of the building has been knocked to make way for a surface carpark – Nice needs the space – but thanks to the efforts of conservationists, the facade is still standing, unloved, unwanted. A woman I met on the bus today told me that a previous mayor had notions of using the site as a rather grander townhall – the current one is stuffed into a small building in old Nice and the cost of additional office accommodation is killing them. But nothing, she said, has been done, and everything takes ages.
Meanwhile, Chemins de Fer de Provence runs its local train service from a newer less interesting looking building about 100m away.
The train trip is hugely scenic. It is also very, very slow and yesterday it was very, very cold. When we got up to the mountains for real, there was 12-18 inches of snow lying around. For the most part, the roads were clear of snow but where it hadn’t been cleared…We don’t know how to handle snow in Ireland and what pitiful little driplets of it we get are pathetic.
The mountains are amazing, however, and coated in white are awe-inspiring in a way I just can’t describe.
What struck me as surprising though was that the snow didn’t cover the whole mountain range. I know its nearly March but the weather happened to be better in Digne than it was in Nice yesterday. Digne; didn’t see much of it. It sits on a river which you get to spend a lot of time looking at when you are in the train. It seems to be not especially big as county towns go – certainly compared to Vannes or Quimper, or Metz which are other county towns/cities that I know. It is, however, in a beautiful if somewhat isolated location.
The train back was in the dark and I have to say it’s very unnerving coming through the snow in the dark.
I’d strongly recommend doing the trip but if you’re there during the summer, I’d recommend hiring a car more and driving around. There is more spectacular scenery to be seen beyond what the train has to offer. I will say this though – if that train line had not been built however many years ago it was built, I question whether we’d have tried to build it today. The mountainous terrain is not forgiving from an engineering point of view and I think from a road point of view, 4 or 5 passes were closed yesterday.
When I got back to Nice, latish, the Carnaval parade was running and I caught a fair whack of it. It was utterly colourful and really big fun. Really and truly, Saint Patrick’s Day is by no means in the same zone.
There was one hell of an atmosphere; and so unrestricted. Kids could go and play in the parade, and fire streamers at the participants – and they did – and people could dance amongst the participants. When you bear in mind the control they have over the parade in Dublin…it’s all curiously relaxed here. And they ran that parade several times this week. Could you imagine the parade in Dublin running every evening for an hour? There would be utter mayhem.
I sort of think, however, that the organisers of the Carnaval in Nice might be worth consulting in Dublin; in fact, a lot of things are done better in various parts of France than they are in Dublin and I think the key issue is probably funding. Nice Ville is picking up a lot of tab for this; the sort of tab that festivals in Dublin would kill for. Obviously Saint Patrick’s Festival is the big one in Dublin, but another example is the Festival of World Cultures in DLR. They’re generally stuck a bit for funds.
I think our priorities are screwed. We want everything as cheap as possible in some respects, particularly when taxes are funding what a lot of people consider non-essential. That being said, Ireland is full of stressed out people whose collective sole outlet appears to be alcohol and the south of France is full of funloving relaxed aliens.
That’s all by way of an aside for one of my later trashing living in Ireland pieces.
Anyway, today I spent at the beach and the beach in Nice is something else. It is bordered land side by the Promenade des Anglais so named because the English rich used to congregate there way back. It is on the edge of a huge bay called the Bay of Angels with the airport on one end and the commercial port on the other end. Do not ask me how long it is. What it is is one yuk beach. The sea is this glorious cyan colour that really couldn’t be natural, no, but the beach itself is nice and stony. That being said, what went through my head is that Dublin has these fantastic none stony beaches that don’t appear to form the centre of our thinking on amenity…
I think I need to go off and plan a future for Dublin that involves knocking down half of Sandymount and Clontarf to make a stunning promenade des future economic prospects or some such.
Tomorrow I haven’t yet decided what to do. I was going to get up at dawn and take pictures of the sunrise but frankly I am too tired.