Nice and Antibes seemed hot. It was late June and the mercury was rising well into the 28's and 29's*. In a welcome as fitting as it was frustrating, our Thursday evening arrival coincided with the nation-wide taxi strike and demonstration against Uber Pop, the private Internet-backed taxi service upsetting taxi rackets and syndicates worldwide. In fact, it really made me want to take a dirty expensive taxi driven by an angry old fat guy. I wanted to uninstall Uber from my phone, stop paying those low prices, wait on a corner for twenty minutes hoping that I had cash on me, but the problem was that they were on strike so I couldn't do any of that. The other problem is that it caused all of the buses to be completely full and since the taxis weren't simply not working but actively blocking traffic lanes -- which everyone loved and immediately therefore started sympathizing with the taxi drivers -- the buses weren't just overfull, they were also late or not coming at all.
*several weeks later in Timisoara and Munich we would be dreaming about a cool day way down in the high-20's
But, some good did come of all this because our friends whose house we were to stay at (context: same friends whose wedding we attended in Lyon and the mountains surrounding Grenoble last summer) then came to get us. But, since the dude just had his work car, which only has two seats, both dude and dudette came and since Sandi is frightened of motorcycles and also, for a double-wammy, is pregnant too, she rode in the two-seater and I got to go on dudette's motorcycle with her which was pretty darn awesome (additional context: dudette is actually Lithuanian Svetlana who also appears in the original Brompton folding bicycle story from approximately two years ago on GWMD).
Yup, that's me there cruising along the beaches on the Côte d'Azur. Some day Helga will look at that picture and I'll say something like "See!? You're Dad was pretty cool back in his day!" and she'll roll her eyes and say something like "Du bist so peinlich Dad!".
So Nice and Antibes were as hot as we could imagine things getting after having spent the last nearly two years living in Oberbayern where the only time you feel uncomfortably hot is when you're wearing your full-length Lederhosen and you mistakenly leave the heat on in your BMW 7-series on the hottest day in July. I can't exactly remember what we got up to on Friday and Saturday which is one good reason why I should have written about this a month ago but on the Friday we saw Thony and extended family, got some lunch together, visited their ritzy rented condo, and drank some tiny cute little French beers which reminded me of Grenoble.
Oh! I remember what we did on Saturday! We drove to Cannes to go to a beach that is supposed to be like the current "it" beach. It seemed pretty similar to most of the other beaches that we'd seen, but we were the guests and all so we just smiled and enjoyed and lay on the beach and even, after approximately seven hundred thousand minutes of Sandi getting her courage up (because there were two itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny cute little jellyfish in the water), we even, even, went for a dip. Oh and here we are selfie-ing it up in the sunshine:
And some rich people enjoying their hard-earned euros in the form of yachts followed by some fine looking people strolling along what is clearly the "it" beach promenade!
Saturday night our hosts' housemate decided to have a party. It was a beautiful hot summer's eve and the house has a great "garden" as the Europeans say but what it actually is is a backyard. Interestingly, Fernando, the housemate, knows every single person that lives in, around, and seemingly anywhere near Antibes.
The "Garden" (the backyard)
Since Sandi and I were the official videographers of Thony's race, and these Ironman things start at 6:30 AM, we were ready to hit the old hay around 11:00 PM. Unfortunately for us, however, no one at this party was anywhere near ready for hitting any hay. They were hitting the impromptu backyard bar just below the window to our bedroom! We "went to bed" around midnight and may have fallen asleep for a few minutes when the heavy bass finally was shut off around 4:45 AM. Our alarms then promptly woke us up fifteen minutes later at 5:00 AM, we took Van's work car that he had graciously lent us ("don't worry.. if you crash it it's just my work's car"), and we began the twenty-five minute drive into downtown Nice. Upon arrival, we thought we'd found a great parking spot right by the beach, right by the start! Turns out the beach is a little longer than we thought and so we had a bit of a walk to get there. No matter.. it was a great morning to watch the sunrise.
Sandi walking from Will Darling on Vimeo.
The race itself was a lot of fun. Despite getting essentially zero sleep, and in fact one could characterize what we got as actually negative sleep because if we'd just lay in bed listening to birds sing and waves break then we'd probably feel better than if we'd had a set of 2 meter-tall speakers belting out overly-bassified hiphop just below our bedroom all night (which we had), and so let's revert that and say despite having negative sleep, we enjoyed the whole day and cheered on our buddy Thony and even filmed the whole thing. We had some beers with his parents (well, I did.. Sandi had an ice cream cone), we did some shopping for Helga, and we even got some pictures of us rocking the aero position (although it says "je suis FINISHER" we actually were not FINISHER because we didn't do the race).
Even throughout all that excitement, we -- as I said -- filmed a bunch of goings-on of the race. Editing the whole thing and turning it into a full feature-length film will take some time and it's taken me over a month just to write about the actual filming of it, so people (namely Thony) will have some time to kill before they can kick back with a bag of popcorn and watch this thing, but in the meantime, here is a trailer that you can enjoy:
Two Swedes On the Côte d’Azur from Will Darling on Vimeo.
So that's the trailer. Yes, Thony finished the race and he even got a medal. I tested the gold for purity:
And though Sandi and I had been up since 5 AM cheering everyone on and filming and all that stuff, Svetlana and Van did finally make it at the end of the day to help cheer on the final finishers:
So that's it! That was Nice. On Monday we walked around Antibes and ate some bio ("organic") lunches and (Mom will love this) bought and wrote some postcards!
Stay tuned for the Romania wedding post hopefully coming soon... Here's a preview:
