Nice Friday 9 May, Day 16

Today we headed off through the quiet early morning streets of Marseille to catch our 7.30 train. Great coffee at the station, followed by a mad stampede of fellow passengers for the train once the platform was announced, but we managed to find seats together and sat watching Southern France slide past the train windows.

Left our bags at the hotel, and wandered over to the Chagall Museum. Some mighty expensive housing over that way. The climate is so nice and the place so pretty, I guess that's why the rich want to live here and I can't blame them.

We had a very pleasant lunch in the cafeteria in the lovely garden of the Museum, then headed back to check in and have a siesta which we both needed after the extremely early start today. The room is beautiful. It opens over a beautiful sunny court yard which has a nectarine tree laden with fruit. I feel like I am living in Matisse painting.

We have been wanting to send some stuff back home as we are moving into warmer climate and we have been accumulating stuff as we go along, so we set off down to the local post office with a bag of stuff winnowed from our cases. The whole experience would have made a great movie - fairly chaotic in there, with a rich cast of characters - but we got a box stamped and hopefully on its way back to Australia, and once again had cause to be grateful for the good humoured kindness that we have encountered so often in our time in France. 

It was however a bit stressful, and we felt a bit frazzled on our walk around down town Nice, which actually felt a bit edgy and grungy - perhaps we walked down the wrong streets. The upside of getting lost was that we walked past the restaurant that the lady in the hotel had recommended. We seized the moment and made a reservation which was just as well as it was packed when we went back. And the food was excellent. 

Tonight is our last night in France. We have enjoyed it enormously. My theory, which I formulated this evening over a bottle of lovely Cote de Provence Rouge, is that the French people are basically happy with their lives, and from that basis of happiness they can afford to be generous to strangers like us and also to one another.  They have a real love of their country and a strong sense of being French, of a deep shared experience. Anyway, we would love to come back and maybe spend longer in some of the smaller places, perhaps more self catering next time.

Tomorrow a new country and a new language - just when I was getting the hang of Franglais.