Nice! France!

We're not in Cameroon anymore...

I started my two week vacation off with a smoked salmon, creme fraiche, melted cheese and dill panini. Accompanied with a mini carafe of alsatian wine and finished with an espresso. Sounds amazing right?? And it wasn't even at fancy place, just an average cafe. I was in HEAVEN. Even thought the unusual amount of dairy and rich food made me sick it didn't stop me from getting a Mcflurry afterward.

My french cuisine experience deserves it's own blog entirely, but I'll continue on with something else for now. Nice is a gorgeous city located on the French Riviera. It's a cool mix of French and Italian culture along side the beautiful blues of the Mediterranean. The buildings are warm yellow and rustic orange with terra cotta roofs, iron balconies full of flowers and sea green window shutters. It was absolutely lovely. It was even a nice change to be cold for a while, and I was definitely freezing at a chilly high of barely 70 degrees. This didn't seem to bother anyone else though. People were walking around in tee shirt, tanning on the beach and even some crazy people were swiming. The first night I slept in my fleece jacket under a thick blanket. I stayed in a hostel for two nights that could easily qualify as a three star hotel in Cameroon with hot water, shockingly nice customer service, free high speed internet, clean beds and right in the center of Nice.

Since I wasn't meeting my friends in Paris for a few days, I made friends with others in the hostel. Most of them were younger and almost all spoke english. It was really cool hearing about other people's travels around Europe but a little frustrating when some people had no idea where I had been living for a year. Worse was after I told them about a couple of my experiences, they tried to relate to it in some ridiculous way. It wasn't like that all the time, I did have some good conversations about working in micro finance, the things I missed the most about Cameroon/ and the states, etc, so that was really really great.

I think I handled the dramatic change pretty well. It was weird being in a predominately white country. I kept thinking that I saw people I knew. There were a lot of older people too (Cameroon's average life expectancy is a lot lower) and everyone had a little dog that they went everywhere with, even in stores and restaurants = bizarre. The amount of wealth was just astounding. Instead of running for the race I originally signed up for, I spent one morning recovering not from a bottle of wine, but from a cheese plate and then in the afternoon took a day trip with a few newly made friends to Monaco. The small country is the 16th most developed country in the world. Let me tell you, I almost threw up in my mouth after 3 Lamborghinis drove by us on the street. They made the BMWs there look like Saturns and the yachts were big enough to be confused for a small cruise lines. It was exhausting just looking at all of it.

That night a bunch of us went out to a bar that had a live band playing classic american rock, met some people from Lousiana and felt like a piece of me was back at home. Apart of me wishes that I just continued on to the states to see much missed family and friends. At the same time, I'm so happy to be seeing a new place and meeting up with old college friends. And surprisingly, I still miss Cameroon. Shout out to my parents that made this much needed vacation possible, where ever I ended up being, I'm loving every second of it.