photos, part I

hello, all!
well, it's 9am in atlanta, but after 8 hours of sleep my body woke up and can not be convinced to go back to sleep. i plan to stay in bed for the next couple hours in the hopes that i can sleep more - i'm still quite tired - and i thought i'd look through my photos and post some for you to see. it may take a few minutes for your computer to load the pictures; if they NEVER load, let me know and i will email them to you individually. i took a LOT of photos while i was in france, so if you want to see more on a particular topic, let me know! i won't be posting all of them, but i'll do my best to cater to your interests. more will come later today or tomorrow - this is just installment one.


this is madame kurzenne (on the left, obviously), the host mother that i stayed with, and patricia, a student learning french at the same school as my students. patricia is about my age and is german, and she is also fluent in english and spanish, as well as becoming fluent in french. she wants to get a job as a translator or an interpreter in the next year, so she's been spending about a year perfecting her english, french, and spanish at language schools in the appropriate countries. patricia was pretty much a god send while i was in nice, as madame kurzenne was so good to me, but spoke very little english (and we all know how good my french skills are...).


this is my little bedroom in madame kurzenne's apartment. it was a perfect space for me, and i felt like i had even more space because i was the only person sleeping on the second floor of her apartment, so i had my own bathroom and patricia and madame kurzenne rarely went onto the terrace on the second floor of the apartment. a great set up.


this is a view of the terrace on the second floor of the apartment...when i got home after being out for the day it would be 6pm or so, and i'd sit on the terrace and read or journal or nap for a bit before dinner - we ate quite late by my standards (9pm), but what seems to be normal for the french.


this is the view from the terrace, looking north. the street that the apartment was on ran north to south (you can see a bit of it in this picture), and was lined with restaurants and businesses on the 1st floor of most buildings, and then apartments for several stories above. nice is on the coast (look at a map of france if you aren't sure exactly where it is), but inland there are mountains, which you can see in this photo.


this just amused me, so i had to take a picture. the elevator in our apartment building was built/serviced by the company otis, which as you may know also has a lot of elevators in the united states. if you've been in an elevator in the US recently, you'll remember the large posted sign that tells when the elevator was built, when it was last serviced (it has to be serviced every year), and there will be a very official signature or seal to show that the elevator is safe. this is what we had in our elevator in france - otis visited on may 14 (or 19?), 2007 (i think - it kind of looks like "04," but i am giving them the benefit of the doubt). i giggled a lot when i saw this.


during the first week in nice, gerard and i hiked up a hill near town to a place where gerard knew there was a nice overlook - and this is evidence that it was, indeed, beautiful! so this is a view of nice from above. most of the buildings in nice look like this - tan, about 5 stories high, with red roofs. this looks like what i imagined italy to look like, not france, but a little research revealed to me that nice was part of italy until the 1860s (i think), which solves that problem. downtown nice is in the low-lying area, but the city extends into the hills, as well. the apartment where i stayed was about a 5 minute walk from the beach - 3 or 4 blocks, or so.


because i raved so much about the food in france, i thought i'd post some food pictures. this is the exact salad that i wrote about in my post about food, and i want to eat it off of the computer screen right now. it was a salad with oil and vinegar on it, tomatoes, and pieces of toast with pesto or goat cheese and honey melted on them, with pine nuts sprinkled on top. in the background of the photo you can see that we got olives (evidenced by the pits) to eat before the salads came, and you can also see that we are drinking french beer - kronenbourg - which is both delicious and signifies that gerard and i were eating lunch without the students, which was a nice break and means we weren't stressed out at all when this photo was taken.


nice has a daily flower and vegetable market in "old nice" (the historic part of the city), with maybe a hundred vendors selling food and flowers. the exception to this is mondays, when the flower market is replaced by an antique market. this is a stand selling olives at the flower market...


...and some huge figs being sold by another woman.


various nuts and dried fruits sold by another vendor.