Travels - Nice and Eze

It was rainy and cold all day today, which didn't make for the best day walking around Nice. I don't want to make this journal a "today, I did xyz...", but for the purpose of describing trips, that's probably what it will be. We had a two-hour bus ride to Nice. Once we got there (around 10:30) we were dropped off and told to be back at the bus at 2:00 to go to the Matisse Museum or 4:00 if you didn't go to the museum. I wandered around with several other girls from the program - walked briefly on the beach, climbed a huge staircase to a castle park with a waterfall overlooking the city, and walked through the open-air market. We had lunch in the old town where they make Socca - a pancake-like dish made with chickpea flour. It was good at first, but the taste changed (and improved) considerably as it cooled off, which I wasn't expecting.

After lunch we wandered a bit more. I was planning to spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around the city since I'm not a big fan of Matisse, but I was so cold that I decided to go just to get inside and warm up. As it turned out, we weren't there for that long and there was a ruined Roman amphitheater next door to the museum which was pretty interesting.

I'm not sure what it is, but my experience has told me that if you put a limited number of young Americans together in a fairly closed group, the social structure will imitate that of junior high or high school. People complain about that all the time with the co-ops and I'm seeing it here too. But maybe here it's because we're treated like we're in high school - after we finished at the museum, we had a five minute tour of a perfume factory and half an hour to wander around a medieval town called Eze. Then they took us to the language school that had dorms where we were staying for the night. And then they locked us in at 6:30 pm. I couldn't believe it - we could've walked to Monaco for the evening or at least had the choice to go do something, but instead we were given dinner, and then the tables were pushed aside, they turned on music and called it a disco. I'm still dumbfounded. I understand that there are some people on this trip who are enjoying their new-found legal drinking status a little too much, but this is ridiculous... we all signed a form saying that we are adults and will take responsibility for our actions here, but I guess they didn't want to give us that choice. Fortunately, all the rest of the school-trips are day trips, so I'll probably still go, but otherwise... grr.