I’m currently in the process of changing my name to my new married name. So far I’ve completed it with one of my banks, my drivers license, my scooter registration, eBay, face book, PayPal and I’ve set up an email address in my new name.
I’m slowly phasing out the old email address and am going through the old emails to see if there is anything I want or need to keep. Tonight I came across an email that I absolutely had to keep – it was our Treasure-Map Nicoise.
Hubby (then fiancé) and I spent 5 weeks in Europe last year, we spent most of our time in the UK but we also went to Barcelona and had a week in Nice. When I booked our apartment in Nice the owner sent me an email with a treasure map of how to get the key to the apartment – it seemed a fun but fairly straightforward way to get access. The actual night was quite different.
Our flight from Barcelona arrived in Nice at 10.35pm. We got a taxi fairly easily from the airport and gave the Taxi driver the address we needed to go to. The taxi driver groaned when he saw the address, immediately added 10 Euros on the bill and said that street was impossible to go down and he would take us as close as possible. He dropped us at the edge of a beautiful large square that we soon came to know as Place de la Prefecture and pointed gruffly towards the opposite side of the square.
We lugged our suitcases out of the cab and started across the square in the direction he had pointed towards a huge group of people making enormous amounts of noise. As we got closer we could see that it seemed to be a collection of bars that were full on the inside and full on the outside and the streets were full and the sidewalk was full and the other side of the road there was a car park that was full of scooters and people sitting among the scooters and leaning on the scooters and leaning on the walls and drinking and laughing and it was all a little bit crazy.
Each time a car tried to pass through this section of the road they would drive very slowly and beep their horns and very slowly the hoard would disperse just enough to let the car through and then mill back onto the road – filling it as if it had never been there. Our instructions were to look for the scooter parked across from Wayne’s bar. Under the seat of the scooter there would be an unmarked key and this would open the door to the apartment block on a nearby street. Step one seemed easy enough. We decided I would stay with the suitcases while he would try to find the right scooter among the hoards of drunks. He left me outside Wayne’s bar and fought through the crowd with the map in his hand trying to find the scooter with the right rego number.
During his absence I was privileged enough to see a Capoeira street group come running through the crowd, build themselves an arena in the crowd using only the beat of their drums and put on the most spectacular show of physical strength and agility I had ever seen. The crowd whooped and cheered as they kicked and flipped and threw their bodies around to the beat of the drums. They moved on as quickly as they came, luckily we saw them many more times in our trip. In fact the carnival atmosphere of our first night that we thought must have been a once off for a special occasion was your usual night outside Wayne’s bar. We slept with our window closed.
He arrived back from Scooterquest looking exhausted but triumphant with a key in his hand and it was on to Step 2 – find the right street.
We looked around us and tried to find the landmarks that had been pointed out for us on the map, we couldn’t see the Real Estate agent that apparently had our spare key, we couldn’t see the Pouletterie that was apparently below the apartment and we definitely couldn’t see the brown door that we were meant to open with our newly acquired key.
It was my job with my basic knowledge of French to ask for help. I managed to make myself understood but we definitely asked the wrong people. No one knew where this street was, no one knew where the real estate agent was or the Pouletterie. So we started wandering, pulling our suitcases through the crowd looking at every door we could see and comparing it to the picture of the door we were meant to enter. After about 30 minutes of wandering we found the right street sign and the relief we felt on finding it was soon overtaken with dread when we opened the heavy door. In front of us we saw a pitch black, very narrow, very steep set of 16th century steps. 6th floor sounded appealing when I booked the place. Not so much anymore.
Step 3 was to go up to the fifth floor, open the cupboard that was up there, use the code given to us with the treasure map to open the safe within that would have a second set of keys that opened the apartment door. By this time it was well after midnight, the past few days in Barcelona had been far from relaxing (crazy party town – go there!) and we were absolutely exhausted. We couldn’t find a light switch so we dragged our suitcases up the 12 flights of steep uneven narrow stairs in pitch darkness. At this stage both of us were regretting going on the stupid holiday and were dreading our time in this stupid apartment in this stupid city with all these stupid drunk people outside.
We reached the top, we found the cupboard, we opened the safe, we got the keys and we entered the apartment. Opening the door the place was trashed, there were dirty dishes in the sink, a pile of dirty sheets on the floor of the bedroom and hubby just about turned round and walked straight back out. If we had anywhere else to go he probably would have. After coaxing him into a better mood by showing him the flat screen TV mounted in front of the bed that had English sport channels I managed to find some clean sheets in a box under the bed and things started to look up. The apartment itself was absolutely beautiful and when we opened the windows to the little balcony you could see the commotion below and smell the insanely good smells from the late night café that was on the ground floor of our building.
We got changed, showered the plane off us, had a quick smoke out the window and decided we were ready to meet Nice. This first night was an adventure but our time in Nice was our favourite bit of the whole trip. I fell in love with the colours of Nice, apparently the light is different in the south of France and it makes even mundane normal colours seem to glow but Nice is nothing but normal or mundane. Everything is bright and showy, the old architecture blends beautifully with the new, the outdoor spaces move seamlessly through the city so you can walk from the beach to the centre of town without your feet leaving grass. Everything in Nice is magical and I would happily go back and spend months there. Especially in a sixth floor apartment in the centre of crazy old town.
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