Our First Week!

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We've been traveling for a little over a week now and we have been having a blast. No major catastrophes and jam packed days. Our flight from Philly to London landed on Saturday morning. Our first destination was Nice, but we had a few hours to kill until our evening flight. We got off at Heathrow and hopped on the tube to Picadilly  Circus where we grabbed some lunch and let it sink in that we were spending the next three weeks living a nomadic life. We were nervous for sure but excited about what was ahead. We spent the next few hours relaxing in the Royal Gardens dozing off and people watching and then we were off to Nice.

Nice was a fantastic place to start our journey. Although it was very hot the weather was sunny and perfect for beach type activities. We stayed at two hostels while we were there. A kind of blah place our first night that we booked out of convince and price was good, and then the next three nights one of the top rated hostels in the world, which was a really nice facility but drew a very strange crowd. Over the three days that we were there we saw back packers, families, a group of older women who must have been 70ish, and more. We also had some pretty rude roommates. A group of boys that two nights in a row came in to the room at 4:30am turned on the lights and chatted like it was midday, when there were at least 8 other people asleep in the room. On top of that, their topics of discussion were quite crude. Both Rosie and I discussed how we hope that they contract some sort of STD and learn a little lesson. Extreme, maybe- but if you heard the things they were saying I'm sure you would agree. Besides our hostel adventure, we did a lot of really great things on the Cote D'Azure. Our first full day we headed over to Cannes to check out the last day of the film festival. We spend the day hanging out on the beach and checking out the festival village, and then that evening we waited at the red carpet to see all the stars. Since it was the closing night, we saw a lot of people! Besides every famous French star (the only two I recognized were Marian Cottard and the man that was in the movie Bogus) we saw Kirsten Dunst, Rosario Dawson, Ryan Gossling, Jane Fonda, Jude Law, Uma Thermon and Robert DiNiero. It was a lot of fun! Then we headed back to the hostel to plan the rest of our trip. That night we made a decision to change the course of our travel. Originally we were thinking Nice, Madrid, Lisbon and then back to the UK, but neither of us were too excited about Madrid so we decided to change our travel all together. Our trip now is as follows, Nice, Milan, Interlaken, Bruges, Brussels, Edinburgh, Bornemeth and then London. We left our planning session feeling really exited about the rest of our trip. 
The rest of our days in Nice consisted of a trip to the midevil town of Eze, which provided us with an amazing view of the coast, a trip to Monaco, which was less then exciting because the whole city was covered in temporary fences for the grand prix, a morning at the contemporary art museum, a stroll through the fruit and flower market, and a hike down to the breathtaking beach of Plage Mala, near Cap D'ai (a coastal town between Ville Franche and Monaco). We left the south of France tan and excited about how much we packed in to the three full days we were there. 
Next stop Milan! Milan is about a 5 hour train ride away from Nice and while on the train we got an impromptu italian lesson from an older woman who spoke very little English. Between the three of us we could piece together a conversation of broken French, English and Italian, but even with the language barrier we still managed to have a conversation with her. It was really fun trying to figure out what the other was saying, and by the end, we could understand a lot of her Italian. One of the nicest things about Milan is that we were staying in a budget hotel, so we got our own room. After staying in 12 person dorms,  the privacy was refreshing. When we got to Milan we had very little idea of what the city had to offer, and so upon our arrival we began our search for the tourism office. We didn't end up finding it until the next day, due to conflicting directions and Milan's confusing streets, but we did get to see a lot in Milan. There were art museums, the castle, the Duomo- which was amazing, we got 10 euro tickets to see Balanchine's Jewel Ballet at the Teatra De Scalla, one of the most famous opera houses in the world. The problem was that our tickets were on the 6th balcony, and had no visibly. We snuck into some seats closer up, and even though we still had to crane our necks we could see... and it was a beautiful show. Our last day in Milan (yesterday) in rained a lot. We hopped from free museum to free museum, and we realizes that they were free for a reason- there wasn't much to see. But we relaxed and had a great day regardless. 

I'm writing this as we are on the train to switzerland. We have been to Interlaken before, but we really loved it the last time we went, and we wanted to spend some of our trip doing some outdoorsy stuff. I will report back as to all of the adventures (or misadventures) of or time with the Swiss, but for now- that's all I got. 

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