Homeopaths and Hobos, Piscines and Porches

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We left Aix not too early, after having breakfast, and checked out with no real incident. The walk to the train station was pretty short and thankfully it was all downhill, because our cases were just full of souvenirs and extra clothes that Sam bought in Paris. Sam was still feeling unwell, so we were glad that at least the sun was out.

Because Aix is a little out of the way, we had to catch a train to Marseille-St Charles then connect to the TGV there. The station at Aix was tiny and to get to the platform we had to walk across the actual train track... Totally safe but a bit unusual for us.

We only bought 2nd class tickets from Marseille, which was a bad idea, but we'll not make that mistake again.. what with all the commoners...

Anyway... The train trip to Nice was quite picturesque. The scenery was ever changing, because we were heading from a small Provencal city, thru rural France and into a major seaside city. Of course, becasue the climate gets warmer the further south you go, more and more houses swimming pools (Piscince is the French word for swimming pool and is pronounced pi-ssin. So as we got closer to Nice, the country cottages slower turned into houses, the trees and fields started turning into rows and rows of houses and all shapes and sizes od piscines. It appears that in this part of France everyone is fond of a good piscine and the closer to Nice we got, the more piscine's there were to see.

Once we got to Nice, we headed straight for the Holiday Inn, which is only 50 metres from the Gare-SNCF and checked in. The first thing we did then was book a day trip the fot the next day and ask the nice lady at reception where the nearest doctor was.

Unfortunately, it was a public holiday in France, I think to commemorate all the soldiers that had died after the war in piscine related accidents, so we had to walk to the local hospital and see the doctor there. The hospital is at least 15 mins walk from the hotel, and the queue was long and slow. By the time we got served (55 minutes), we got told we were in the wrong queue and the girl sent us to another waiting room, were we waited another 50 minutes to be attended to. After some small talk about Australia and some poking and prodding, the doctor told Sam she had a virus on her tonsils (which have actually been removed previously) and proceeded to prescribe her with some funny sounding pills. When Sam asked if they were anti-biotics, the doctor said no, they're homeopathic remedies and charged us 40 Euros for the consult... Sam was not impressed, and all the way back kept talking about how it was as rip off and the doctors here are a joke... When we got the medicine and Sam gave it a try, she hated the taste and didn't take it again.

On our second day in Nice, we took a day trip in a small tour van. The driver's name was Sylvie and she was really good. There were two aussies along for the trip and three americans, which was really unlucky we thought. The tour guide actually got sick of the guys dumb questions and stopped answering him in the end! We managed to see quite a lot in the one day too, which bought us an extra day, which was good for Sam as she needed time to recover from the doctor's appointement and from her troat virus!

All in all, we got to see Monaco, Cannes, Antibes, Eze and St Paul de Vence. That left us a couple more days basically to relax and do what ever we wanted, but more about that in the next blog...

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