Nice… It’s um... nice.

We took an easy 3-hour flight from Frankfurt to Nice. Time to put my French language skills to the test! When we arrived, it was cool and rainy, but we took a walk anyway because it seemed kinda warm (compared to Germany), and … come on, it’s Nice. On its worst day, it’s still pretty awesome.

We walked past all the fancy famous waterfront hotels that are in no way a part of our budget:

A cute café for a break from the rain and some decadent hot chocolate - I got one with marshmallows and found out later that it was called "kid's hot chocolate." Vince got hot white chocolate. Mmmm.

After warming up, we walked through the old town and saw a couple of old churches (there is definitely a specific style to these, I think “dark and ornate” sums it up.

Through some narrow streets and grand squares, and called it a (rainy) day.

The next day was a gorgeous sunny day, great for re-tracing our steps.

We found some cartoonish people on the beach, had a laugh –

We found out that there was “Nice Carnival” with the theme of “King of the Sea” going on during our stay (good timing!), so we went to a couple of the parades.

This is the daytime Flower Parade:

This guy had neither flowers, nor a sea theme, but he was our favorite. I think it was the confetti hose, or maybe the sunglasses.

There were some relatively un-impressive sea-themed balloons… All in all, this parade wasn’t as impressive as the night-time Carnival Parade – but I’ll get to that later.

After the parade, we visited the Notre Dame Cathedral (it seems like every town in Southern France has a Notre Dame church), and spent some more time in the old town.

We walked to the top of a huge hill ("Castle Hill") that has an old Chateaux and cemetery on top, along with some Roman ruins & medieval walls.

The view inland has some mountains (we think the edge of the French Alps) in the background.

At the top, there are some medieval fortress walls:

Here is the view looking out over the other side of the hill - this side is Port Nice:

And, back to the other side for a nighttime view of “our side of the hill,” which is "Old Nice"

We had an adventure up here, got locked INTO the park… But found our way out along the road, just went around some barriers.

After a yummy 3-course French dinner, we stopped by the night-time Carnival parade on the way home. This was a much more impressive parade, with lots of music and big floats.

Here are a bunch of oversized Jacque Cousteau’s…

Here are some huge dancing French ladies:

And here is one of the huge floats, we estimate 8 or 10 stories high. For scale, there is a costumed person between the 2 green seahorses – I’ve also included 2 other pictures that show a person dressed like a fairy, on the back of the seahorse.

So, a good time was had by all in Nice, it was really fun to be there during a festival. For the next 2 days, we took daytrips out to Monte Carlo and Cannes.