Look, I did something!

So gave myself a stern talking-to for my inactivity over the holidays, which resulted in me walking up to the cemetery on the hill overlooking Old Town and the Baie des Anges. Luckily, last Friday was warm and sunny and gorgeous - unlike the last few days - the walk was pleasant and the view was GORGEOUS. Will definitely have to take the fam up on a nice day when they come to visit. You can see the whole sweep of the bay, with the calm Mediterranean Sea looking like someone has spilt a bucket of bright blue paint on a mirror. In the other direction, the red roofs of Old Town stretch out (well, for a short distance) before you, and then there are the hills behind (couldn't really work out where my house was, sense of direction = poor, as Ranch would agree).

Up the top of the hill are a lot of walking trails, park-y type spaces, a pretty cool man-made waterfall, and some ruins of the old castle and fortifications which once defended Nice. Supposedly this is the oldest area (some pretty old prehistoric remains have been found) along with the Greek/Roman ruins near my house. Makes sense since it's a pretty strategic position with the view across the bay etc.

There's also the Jewish and Christian cemeteries, which are pretty cool, especially the Christian one since that has more fancy statues. Plus I found one section which is like a street map of Nice brought to... um, life... All the big names - Medecin, Malaussena, Grosso, Pastorelli. Would be interested to know who some of these people were and what they did to deserve streets named after them and being buried in the special section of the cemetery. There was also Garibaldi's grave (not with the Nice bigwigs) which was pretty cool as far as grave-spotting goes. He must have been so gutted that Nice didn't wind up as part of Italy. Sucks to be you eh Garibaldi? Hmm I actually just Wikipediad him and turns out his grave is not in Nice, they just for some reason put a monument to him amongst the other graves, in a graveyard, which looks exactly like a tombstone. Oh well, whatever.

The only other thing of note that happened while I was up the hill was the 12 o'clock cannons going off. These fire twice every day at (duh) 12 o'clock. If you're alert, you can hear them from my house and presumably all over the city, but day-ummm, they are LOUD from the vantage point of that hill! Luckily enough I had heard the church bells a second before and knew they were about to fire, because I'm trying to cultivate an air of insouciance in the face of cannonry, in order not to jump and look like a dick/tourist whenever they go off.

Nothing else interesting to report (how could I top that story?) Had my first 8 am class today, wasn't too bad, it was one of the easy ones where I listen and critique their speaking. TWO of my classes are now cancelled tomorrow, leaving only one. Sah-weet! Will try to motivate myself again to get out and do something, even though it's rainy and cold. Maybe a museum or such. Wednesday is a holiday, Armistice Day, although typically it's on the only weekday I have off anyway, so same old same old for me. And yeah, that's it until the next exciting installment!