It's been a long, long, long time

I haven't updated my blog in a while, so I'm going to try and remember everything that's happened in the past few weeks and write it down.

David and I went to Nice a few weeks ago. For those of you who don't know, Nice is a kind of resort town in the south of France, right next to Italy, and in fact, it has shifted from Italian to French rule several times until 1860, when Napoleon III and struck a deal with Camillo Benso di Cavour to exchange the Nice and Savoy region in exchange for military aid (Thank you Wikipedia!). Nice has since become a big resort town, what with the weather being very nice and the beach being right there. The place is clearly thriving, but it still has this Belle-Epoque-Pleasure-Palace-That-Is-Rotting-From-The-Inside kind of quality, even though it isn't really. The whole town was under construction at the time (I think they're trying to build tramways on the streets), but because the older part of town has been around for a few thousand years, all the excavation has unearthed these old stone structures. You walk past all this metal fencing and concrete dividers, and suddenly there's a giant hole in the ground with the bleached stone foundation for some ancient Greek hovel (The Nice region was not originally Gallic, but Greek. Thanks again!).

David and I went for Carnival, so there were parades all weekend, with huge fuck-off floats that were both whimsical and disturbing. Take, for instance, the "togetherness" float: it was one of those mixers, I don't know what they're called, it has two whisks and a bowl and you turn on the machine to mix the contents of the bowl...anyway, on top of the mixer was part of a globe with all the peoples of the world holding hands, and in the bowl itself were babies with different colored body parts, like a black head against a white torso, or an Asian head against a black torso. Really weird shit like that. In addition to that, there are all these street vendors who sell confetti and silly string, and your average French child (and even the occassional rascally adult) will spray strangers with the string and toss the confetti in your face, much to the dismay of the humorless elderly and American tourists who aren't used to that kind of thing.

All in all it was a good time, but as soon as I got back I started vomitting. A lot. I hadn't been sleeping well before I left, and when then when I got to France I started eating a lot of shellfish and nutella, so God knows what it actually was. Fortunately, I didn't have any more work to do. I will write another post about other Oxford times, because there is far too much information to put into a single, readable post.