Advertisement
Published: March 8th 2009
Venice is known to be the spot for Carnival, but it proved a little difficult and too expensive to plan, so we decided to do Carnival in Nice, France. The theme this year was "Roi des Mascarades" and it was the 125th year it was being held. There are two main parades, the Flower Parade along the waterfront during the day and then the Parade of Lights which is held at night.
Saturday, the day of both parades goes down as one of my favorite days in Europe. To start the day off, we went out in search of a tasty breakfast and stumbled upon a huge flower and food market. I think all of my favorite cities are the ones that have outdoor markets. We decided to just buy picnic fixings and take it all down to the beach. It was so hard to not buy it all. We settled on sun-dried tomatoes, fresh tapenade spread, strawberries (which were gone in 2 minutes), fresh baguettes, the biggest red peppers I have ever seen, an olive medley, and some little doughnut balls for dessert! This has become a fairly typical picnic spread, but oh so good! The sun kept poking through
and so we took our picnic down to the beach.
After lunch we climbed up to the top of this lookout to see the whole town of Nice and we saw the floats getting in line for the flower parade. We went and lined up for the parade and saw kids in costumes and vendors selling silly string and confetti. The flower parade was beautiful- they toss out flowers into the crowd and everyone collects their flowers. Kari nearly tackled a man for hers, and although he ended up with it, I think to applaud her effort he kindly gave it to her 😊 There were dancers, big floating balloons, and acrobats as well!
We spent our time in the afternoon exploring some of the Old Town of Nice and the art stores. We watched the sunset along the boardwalk and were entertained by the trick rollerbladers. Around 10pm, the festival of lights began. Before the parade everyone was armed with silly string. It didn't matter how old you were or if you wanted to be sprayed or not, it was madness! I saw old men getting it stuck in their hearing aids and little children tormenting their parents, it
was hilarious. We were right next to all the floats as they came down the boulevard and the crowds were a lot of fun. It was cool to see all the bright lights on the floats and dance along with the music! We went home after a fun night covered in confetti and silly string.
The next morning Kari and I woke up at 5:45am to catch a train together back to Paris!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.05s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 25; dbt: 0.0274s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.1mb
Leslie Whalen
non-member comment
Nice-NAS!
Hey, Kaitlin, You definitely have that French scarf thing going on! Glad to hear that your time with Kari has been so much fun; I think I want to go live in the house where she is living--que sampa! I also hope that your birthday was a great one...Stef is going out with a bunch of folks tonight to celebrate Joe's 21st. Lotsa March birthdays (your dad's, too!) It is a beautiful, clear-but-freezing March day here; I'm sure your mom told you that it SNOWED earlier this week. Only three hours to Nice--tempting when it's cold in Paris, I bet. Hope there are signs of spring there!