Its Nice to be Nice in Nice

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Alright so after all the corner cutting and excuses I thought it is about time that I go back and fill in the gaps in the blog. I just hope that that the gaps in my memory aren't bigger than the ones I have left in the story. After a quick review I believe the last gap I left was between the last half of Barcelona and Corfu.

So after we had finally finished our mammoth Tappas we headed off to the Hard Rock Cafe in Barcelona which is where the group would be meeting to experience real Flamenco Dancing! Unfortunately this would be one of those things that we would describe as something we were "glad we did, but wished we hadn't paid for". When I was told Flamenco Dancing I was expecting something like the Cabaret show in France with extravagant costumes and exciting music, unfortunately the highlights were the shots of tequila we had at the start and the finish and the free Sangria.

We were walked into a small room that pretty much looked like your standard bar there was the bar down the right, another small one in the left hand corner, a DJ booth to your left as you walked in and a small stage in the other corner surrounded by chairs. We were all sat down, after we had bought our shots of course, and we were all told how to, I guess, salute the performers. You see in Flamenco dancing we were told that the performers use a guitar, their feet and their hands to make music. Which Danny and I found useful through out the rest of the trip because everytime we were bored and in a crowd we would drop a hat and start flamenco clapping to try and make money, we almost did a couple of times too. So, to get back to the story, by clapping your hands you were actually probably going to put them off the beat, so, instead you had to say "Ole'!" and "Ole' Whoppa" for a girl and "Ole' Whoppo" for a guy. Then we were shown how to drink from a Sangeria Bottle. For those of you not informed a Sangeria bottle is shaped like, well I guess like a duck, this is the only picture of the bottle I could find and I think it might have been taken at the same joint I am talking about, at least it looks like it. I got asked to drink from it and of course I won with the furthest pour...whilst kneeling too, no big deal really but I got an "Ole' Whoppo" none the less.

Look I am going to put it out there; the girls were like watching paint dry. They were as boring as bat crap, but the guy made it all up he was fantastic. In fact it was when the guy came on that the shot and the Sangria started to kick in a little and I noticed one of the couples on my tour off to the side clapping along. I thought to myself "I'll give that a crack" and started getting into it, about two seconds after I started to do this the male performer looked at me and then told me off...in dance! Before I even had a chance to give my best "they started it" interpretive break-dance he had pirouetted off to another part of the stage, bastard! Anyway the rest of the night went well and later they got us all up to do some group dancing which was probably the highlight of the night despite the limelight not being on myself, they started by getting us to do a dance up and down the room and then gradually sped it up until it became a mess. Then they did the same thing with that song that was big a couple of year ago, "The ketchup song" A hey, a ha a ha a blah blah blah boogie and a etc if you haven't remembered it by now you wont.

The next night our tour manager and some of the Contiki Reps at the campsite took us out for a night in Barcelona. Barcelona is apparently one of the party capitals of the world. It might be, but I would say we just went out on a bad night because it was good, don't get me wrong, but it was pretty much the same as everywhere else. Nothing particularly eventful happened for the rest of the night it was just pretty much your standard party your butt off night. Oh! Except that we had our first experience with Shesha. I'm not sure if this will work but that is a photo of me and friends with the Shesha pipe if it doesn't work I have tagged myself with it on facebook so you can look there. Before you freak out all Shesha is, is flavoured tobacco but it was all a bit of fun. That night they got Aniseed and it was pretty good and definitely a pretty cool novelty to be smoking out of this massive pipe.

The next day we were off to Nice in the French Rivera. On the way we were dazzled by the beautiful sights off the top of the mountains overlooking the ocean and the houses on the French Rivera (once again check facebook for the photos). On the way we stopped off at a French perfume factory called Fraggonards, I think that's how its spelled. There we got a tour of the factory and a little information about the history of the place and how they make the perfumes.

I'd like to stop here for a second and tell you about something that has been confusing me since I left that place. While we were there they told us about these guys. They called them Noses and apparently there are only about 120 odd people around the world that can be noses. Basically what they do is for 3 or so hours a day they sit around and sniff different perfumes and say what is missing, what’s there etc. Basically your perfume quality control. Oh, and they also come up with new fragrances and stuff. What the tour guide said was there were only a few people in the world that can do this and the people who can do it have to train for about 50 years to do it.

Can no one else see the glaring hole in this whole thing? Is being a "Nose" not unlike being a Psychic. Only a few people can do it and the people who can't do it are almost completely oblivious to the whole thing. On top of that what is the point training for 50 years to learn to smell something that no one else can anyway! I am damned glad we didn't get to meet any of these noses because I think the conversation might have gone something like this.

Nose: "This smells strongly of Lemon Grass"
Wingnut : "No dude that's just Lemon"
Nose: "How would you know young man? You are not a Nose"
(pause)
(Wingnut dives over the desk and grabs "Nose" by his tie whilst being held back by the group)
Wingnut: "Come here I'm gonna break your nose you %!@(MISSING)$" toffy %!$(MISSING)"^%!$(MISSING)£$£"£!$ bastard and then I'll %!^(MISSING)%!$(MISSING)^££"

...and so forth

Moving on we were then driven down to the French Rivera. This place, to put it simply, was beautiful. It was like Surfer’s Paradise on Steroids. The first thing we want to do was hit the private beaches. You see in Europe there is this concept of public and private beaches. To give you an idea, all of Australia, or at least in my experience, is a public beach. You show up, you splash around, you leave.

On a private beach you pay an entry fee and a fee to hire a deck chair and sun umbrella which are set up all over the beach for you. Then you sit there with your best sunnies on, get your bronze on, admire the view (Europeans are quiet worried about tan lines) and get served beer at exorbitant prices breaking it all up with a dip here and there with the boys….with your sunnies on. It was difficult getting out of the water however (not for that reason) its just that Europe is big on its pebble beaches i.e. instead of stad there are rocks everywhere. In some places they are small, like gravel, this is what the beaches in Corfu were like. However in this particular place there were massive pebbles ranging from the size of your knee cap to the size of your entire foot. Both types of beaches were pretty ordinary but this sucked in particular because it made it extremely difficult to “Hasslehoff” out of the water because every time the water went back out to sea it took a heap of massive rocks back with it each just begging to crush your toes. What made it worse is the Europeans were used of it so whilst the women confidently strolled out the water we were tripping over and screaming like school girls being hit by water balloons.

In short Nice and its private beaches were fantastic and something I had never seen before. Unfortunately we could only pretend to be toffy for so long before we noticed the funds starting to run dry. So with that we were out of there to shop for new shirts to wear to Monaco that evening. You see we had all worn our best duds to the Cabaret night only a few nights ago and although we were all in the same boat we did not want to end up having to double up. So it was time to go Shhhhhopping! We had heard from some other boys that they found a place to get nice shirts on the cheap. Unfortunately by the time we got there the only two casual shirts they had we were told not to buy because the other boys had already bought them…thanks guys. We went in search of other outfits and eventually we all stumbled across something we liked. Of course, nothing we liked didn’t blow the budget so that was a little worrying but when were we going to go shopping for clothes in France again, come on!

That night we set off for Monaco, a sovereign country in the middle of France, known for all of the rich people that live there and the way they like to spend money and shit they don't need. On the way there we were told by our tour manager that we all had to have our passports with us. As we neared the border we were told that, obviously, Monaco was a very rich country and as such they were able to afford quiet nice things. One of which was a high-tech scanning facility where-by instead of stopping at the border we simply had to hold up our passports to the window with our faces by the window and we would be scanned as we entered. I thought this was really cool and I wondered how they got over the motion blur and the fact that the bus had tinted windows and how they would get the photos without using flash or night vision. To answer those questions, they didn’t, she tricked us, Bitch! This was one of many pranks that our tour manager would pull on us which I was constantly telling she was unfair and unfunny because we were half way across the world and being guided by her, of course she was going to be able to trick us, it was like fishing with dynamite.

Once we got in there we were given the choice of going to the cheaper Casino or the world famous Monte Carlo casino. Guess which one I picked. The Monte Carlo was probably the most underwhelming place I have ever been in my life. As we walked in we were greeted by a spectacular hall with Roulette tables and few card tables and a small bar to the right. I thought “If this is just the entrance hall I wonder what the rest of the casino is like!” You can see a picture of the room in the centre picture on this link Well, no, that was the whole casino. Apart from a few card tables out the back and an RSL looking pokies room off to the side that main room was the whole casino. All the roulette tables had a 200 Euro buy in so they were out for me. I just played the pokies a little had some, actually reasonably priced, drinks and watch some of the other people on tour play roulette. Another thing about the place that I had never seen from a casino before was the whole place was dead quiet, it was like a library. When Danny won he yelled and was told to quiet down, I don’t know what everyone was concentrating on but it must have been important!

That leads us up to Venice. So I guess the whole rest of Barcelona, French Rivera and Monaco was a bit of a mixed bag of the good and the average. A bit of a shame but an experience I still wouldn't trade at least I can say I have been there done that. Stay tuned for Venice.

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