photos, part II

another round of photos! i think if you click on the photos you can get a larger version of them - though when i did it, the version was too big...but you might want to try it on your computer.


something that was really funny for me is that the cars in nice are SO tiny. this makes sense - many of the roads are much smaller than typical american highways, and gas is expensive in europe - when we were there, gas was 1.42 euros per liter, which (thank you internet calculator) is about $7 per gallon of gas, with the current conversion rate of about $1 to 0.70 euro. (someone check my math...i think that's correct but i'm not totally sure...) the car in this photo is called a smartcar. i would estimate that it is about 6 feet long and 4 feet wide, and if you are driving a smartcar, you can pretty much fit into any parking space, as evidenced by the creative parking job done here...


...and here.


this is a better angle on the last scenario, and a better photo of exactly what a smartcar looks like. i hope you are laughing at this point...i was. a smartcar is only slightly bigger than its door!


back to actual pictures of nice. this is a photo i took in the historic part of nice.


one afternoon during the first week of our trip gerard and i hiked up a hill on the edge of town (where i took the photo of nice from above that you saw in the previous post), and on our walk back down i took this photo of bougainvillea spilling over a wall. the bougainvillea grows all over the place in nice, and was so colorful and so beautiful. the flower/plant is named (according to gerard, and now backed up by the internet) for a french explorer named Louis Bougainville who first brought it to europe from south america. now you are learning something in addition to (hopefully) being entertained by these photos.


while in nice, the students took french classes every morning for three hours and then we all went on field trips in the afternoon - sometimes just to the beach or to a museum in nice, but we also took four trips to neighboring cities and spent the weekend we were there in corsica. the first trip we took was to monaco, a principality of france that is about 30 minutes away from nice by train. in monaco we went to the royal palace where prince albert now lives, as well as to the church where prince rainier, who just recently died, and princess grace (kelly) are buried. this is a photo i took of a tile mosaic inside the church.


the church also had an exhibit, if you could call it that, of old clothing worn by people who worked in the church. the clothing was unlike anything i'd ever seen before. the middle robe (in purple) was a man's robe, i think, while the outside two were women's.


these are four of my students eating ice cream outside the palace in monaco. the ice cream seems more italian to me, but again - whatever. the kids loved it, and were eating it twice a day until money got tight at the end of the trip. very funny.


okay, back to nice. another day during the first week we went to museums in the afternoon with the kids - there is a chagall museum and a matisse museum in nice, both of which were really nice. all museums funded by the federal government of france are free to students and teachers, so we got in free to both of them. victory! on the way to the matisse museum, we stopped by this site - the romans had a settlement in nice a LONG time ago, and there are still some roman ruins in nice. these pictures are from what i guess was an amphitheater and gerard said is now used for concerts. wikipedia (an online encyclopedia) has now revealed to me that nice was first settled in 350 BC by the greeks. it was so incredible to be in a place where the history is so LONG. i realize that's a problematic statement, as the history of humans living in what is now the united states is tens of thousands of years long, but you know what i mean. to be able to see ruins from so long ago was amazing.