Bonjour, mes amis!

This is going to be very light on words and very heavy on pictures. Once I got to my room in Nice and got settled in, I was pretty tired but wanted to stay up til a decent hour at night so I went out for a very long stroll from the apartment down to the harbor, then a ways along the Promenade des Anglais and then up into the rabbit warren of streets that make up "old Nice".  Then back almost to the Promenade to see if I could find a place I had seen going up into old Nice where I thought I would like to eat.  I found it, ate, and then a long, long walk back through the rabbit warren, to the grocery store to get some yogurt for breakfast, and then home where I've been enjoying the e-mails that were waiting for me and editing the photos I took today.

The main reason there won't be much to say about them is that they are just pictures - I don't think I saw any touristy type sites and the few things I saw that I thought probably meant something, I didn't have a guide book to tell me about them so I can't tell you about them.

But it's a record of my day, starting with the first pictures taken from the plane as we came into Nice - it was truly a stunning view and as you'll see from these and the rest of the photos, it was also a beautiful first day.

I'm pretty sure these are the Alps.  And then the rest are of the Mediterranean and Nice as it appeared.

The next batch I took while I was waiting for it to be time to go check into my room.  It's in a woman's apartment, not in a hotel, and she doesn't want people to come until 2:00.  So I did a practice run to make sure I could find her place, then backtracked a little and enjoyed all the pretty parks, trees, flowers, etc.

Now I can tell you that the picture on the left is the statue of Garibaldi who did something heroic I'm pretty sure  It's in the Parc Garibaldi and it's a very nice spot - lots of benches and big.

And on the right are some of the fountains at a strange square called the Acropolis.  I think when I had a guidebook from the library, I read why but I can't remember now.  The building it's all in front of is just a big, square modern building...

And I can also tell you that this is two shots of what locals call "the square head".  My landlady's notes on finding her place said I would turn onto a street and find the square head building and that's where I'd make my next turn.  I sure didn't see anything that looked like a square head and pondered for a while whether to keep going that direction or not, but once I got down to the next intersection, there is was and I LOVE it!!  Turns out it's the public library which is actually underground and in the square head are the library's offices.  Sure would hate to work there - not a window anywhere.

Kind of reminds you of Italy, doesn't it?

And I just left all these in a single line which makes a very long post, but I'm too sleepy to try and arrange them.  I've also discovered that as far as I can tell, you can no longer enlarge the pictures to their original size by clicking on them.  Instead, you go to some weird slide show type set-up.  Don't know that any of you ever did that but on long shots it's hard to get an idea of the details without seeing it larger.

Ah, well, I'm going to see how I do at sleeping.  I lost my ear plugs (will buy some tomorrow if I can remember) and with the windows open which I would prefer, the noise is pretty astounding.  Plus which I'm not too sure how long the TV will be on... but I think tonight I'm sleepy enough to sleep through anything once I get there.

I really have had a nice first day - just too tired to give a good impression of it.  But trust me, you'd love it here too. :)