Emily's Adventures

we had breakfast with maria on our last morning in la spezia and i may have slipped a few packets of crackers and cheese into my bag for later :). the cheeses here are soo yummy. maria had to organise her train to nice so we left her to it and looked around the shops until our bus left at 12.30. the drive into nice was lovely along the coast. we drove in past monacco and listened to abbas money money money and fegies glamourous. so much money and wealth in this town/country its unbelievable. they pointed out where the ferrari team says during the grand prix for 7000 euros a night, it looks really ugly from the outside, apparently they are paying for the view. we also were shown the church where bono got married. married arrived in nice not long after us and us girls went and got chinese from a place a few doors down from our hostel. it looked really yummy cos it was all out on display, but it was really gross and soggy and really expensive. after tea steph and jess had a few drinks at the hostel while maria and i went to find icecream. the icecream hunt ended up being a 1.5hour walk around the old town. on the way to the old town there are these wierd plastic glowing people on poles that line the street and change colour. they sort of look like jelly babies and are really tacky. not what i expected for a town on the french riviera. the shops along the old town were really cute and sold lovely gifts and nice smellies. i know my friends laura and sarah would have loved the shop too. we looked at the beach and watched the lightening on the horizon that was lighting up the whole sky. the next day was marias bday and us girls got dressed up and caught the train to monacco for the day. we started off looking at all the superyachts, so much wealth its unbelievable. we also saw more ferraris, bentlys and jaguars than i have ever seen. we hung around but sadly noone invited us pretty ladies onto their superyachts, what a shame :). after admiring what we could never afford we walked along to the japanese gardens and decided it would make a nice spot to surprise maria with her cake and candles and presents. we did the cake and gave her a scarf and earrings and then the caretaker politely told us we were not meant to sit on the grass nor have a picnic. woops. coming from nz where grass is everywhere we forget that in other countries they just look at it. then he said he could take a group photo of us. he then preceeded to take 8 photos of us as we followed him around the gardens to the 'best spots' while he said magnific. we headed to the casino which has really pretty gardens out the front and took lots of photos. we went in and sat for a while. it is nice inside. but not really wow. it has a lot of gold and navy as its colour scheme. after that we walked up to the palace. they were having some sort of anniversary for the war so there were heaps of people dressed up and the army vehicles everywhere. we took some photos even though we had no idea what was going on as it was all in french. after that we trained back to nice for a nap before dinner.