So first of all we are in Nice and everything is fine. Our train made it to the French border but the French railway (SCNF) refused to take it into France. Apparently the brakes on a few of the train cars didn't work. This didn't seem to bother the Italians who figure if 8 of 10 cars had brakes it was good enough but the French were being sticklers about the whole brake thing.
We ended up having to either 1) Wait until the Italians repaired the cars or 2) Hop another train that as near as we could figure was headed for Nice. Understand my Italian is bad - my French is non existent except for a few phrases Billy and Suzy used to say around the dinner table when they were learning French in high school (darn me always looking to be different and taking German in high school). People seemed to think you're polite when you say "Merci" or "S'il vous plait" but it doesn't take you very far in a real conversation.
We went for option 2 - we figured hopping on a strange train we thought was generally headed in the right direction was a decidedly more sure thing than waiting for the Italian mechanics to fix the train at 4 pm on a Saturday afternoon. Some folks opted to stay - haven't seen them since.
After an anxious hour watching all the railway station signs (We stopped 30 places between the Italian/French border and Nice - we apparently hopped a milk run stopping at each little town on the Riviera) we finally saw a sign that said "Nice - Ville" and got off. By some unimaginably against the odds coincidence it turned out to be the right stop. I did get to listen to a lot of French telling us the next stop - but it's a tough language - I really didn't get it. At least with Italian every letter is generally pronounced so you can kind of get the meaning. French can have a 15 letter word that's pronounced with one syllable.
Minor misfire finding the hotel - the google map was about 1:1 scale and we didn't realize it. The directions were sort of "Go out of the train station" "Turn left, go 1 meter" "Turn right go 10 meters" "You are at your hotel". We over shot by about a factor of 10. But once we really looked at the map our mistake became clear and it was easy to remedy.
Anyway thanks Suzy and Bill - Whatever I was asking of and saying to people I was very polite about it.
At least you weren't on a city bus in Mexico where the driver was weaving in and out of traffic while counting his money. Did I mention the spedometer didn't work so he just went faster than the cars?
ReplyDelete