Carnaval De Nice!

Forewarning: There are a lot of pictures in this post.

The past two weeks have been pretty uneventful on weekdays. We are in our second week of seminars, which are going well but are very long. Luckily, I love both of the classes I am taking: French Civilization and Art History. Two weekends ago, on the 17^th, we woke up early to take the train to Nice to see our friends Laureane and Alex finish the 10-mile race for the Nice Carnaval. While our friends didn’t partake in the costume contest, many others did, making the race much more interesting to watch.

This past weekend Emily, Meghan and I headed back to Nice for the Carnaval itself. We left Friday after our classes, hopped on the train and checked into our hostel around 5pm. There were no parades on Friday night so we walked around Old Town Nice looking for a place to eat and stumbled upon this delicious Italian Restaurant that I can’t remember the name of and it is not to be found on GoogleMaps. I looked at the exact place it is located and nothing shows up; but if you ever go to Nice and want to know where it is, I will give you directions. Saturday morning we got up early and walked around town despite the horrible weather. Of course the day of the parades it decided to be freezing cold and rainy. We hiked up 300 feet of stairs to get to the top of Castle Hill or Colline du Chateau, a beautiful park that has many spots you can stop at and see panoramic views of Nice. We didn’t stay up there too long because it was so cold and we had to get to the parade; but we definitely want to go back when there is nicer weather.

The first parade of the day was the Bataille de Fleurs (Flower Parade.) Before we claimed our standing spot we thought it would be a great idea to buy cat masks. It was in fact a great idea: we caught many of the performers attention with our masks, leading them to give us (mainly Meghan) extra beautiful flowers for our bouquets. The parade was absolutely amazing. The theme of the entire Carnaval de Nice is “King of the Five Continents;” there were floats and performers representing countries from all over the world. In between the beautifully decorated floats covered in flowers there were half naked dancing girls, Chinese “dancers” drunk off sake, dressage horses, circus acts, marching bands, and much more. After standing for two and a half hours watching the parade in the freezing cold we tried walking back to the hostel. However, our legs were too sore to make it and we had to stop in an Irish pub to grab some Irish coffee before continuing on our journey.

Following a quick nap at the hostel and dinner at Pasta Basta we headed out to the Corso Carnavalesque Illuminé (Parade of Lights.) This is where the floats became really interesting. Following the theme of “King of the Five Continents” there were HUGE, GIGANTIC floats portraying many different countries once again. Let me explain to you the American float: picture the statue of liberty, now picture her naked and fat with pasties on her boobs, holding a scale as the bible and a bottle of Coca-Cola as the torch, standing on a hamburger and a crown of ice cream cones on her head. On Right in front of our beautiful statue of liberty was the empire state building, with King Kong on it of course, and right in front of him was a Native American riding a horse. I wish we had a picture of our faces when we first saw it. Aside from the floats being extremely offensive, they were extremely detailed and amazing works of art. My favorite float of the parade was the King of the Five Continents, I don’t really know why but I liked is hat, that he seemed to be playing with a globe, and there was a giraffe on the float.

I really can’t describe how incredible the floats we saw were, so I hope my pictures do them a good deal of justice. If you ever have the chance to go to Carnaval de Nice, you should one hundred and ten percent grasp it. I hope I get to make it back again sometime in my life.

This Friday we will be going to Biot to visit a glass blowing factory and Antibes to see the Picasso museum and on Saturday we are planning on taking the hour and a half long train ride in to Italy for lunch if the weather is nice. I’ll blog again in a couple of days!