Aventures à Provo: Nice and Monaco!

Alright it's now Sunday and I haven't blogged about the last 4 days...getting behind! Bullet points and pictures it is!

Thursday:

excursion to Ecouen-the chateau of Anne de Montmorency. It was pretty cool, but I'm afraid I'm a little chateau'd out...
my roommate Erin had the brilliant idea of doing a photo scavenger hunt around Paris since we know the city well now. It was super fun! And my friend Lorraine came down from London so she joined us.

Some of the requirements:

a giant jar of nutella
someone obviously foreign
gypsies
eiffel tower
in a fancy perfume shop
arc de triomphe
a nun
a couple making out
the giant head at Les Halles.... you get the idea

giant jar of nutella

Smelling fancy perfume

Lorraine!

we made dinner for our host mom Claude and it turned out really good! Taco salad with all the works, homemade salsa and homemade chocolate chip cookies. It was a bit of experimenting because I had to use a scale and guesstimate the ingredients. You'd be proud mom they turned out great! Claude was so cute asking all seriously how to do it. And Gloria, her 5 year old granddaughter ate with us too. I told them it was my mom's recipe (actually it's Ellen's but I got it from my mom's blog and that would have been more complicated to explain) and Gloria asked if my mom was a pastry chef. haha it was adorable.

after dinner we headed out to the Eiffel Tower to hang out with some people and see the lights. I love Paris!

Friday:

I joined the BYU art history study abroad for one of their tours of the Louvre. It was pretty cool to hear the art professor's takes on some of the paintings
we wandered around the street stalls along the Seine and found some cool souvenirs. I love those little booths!
I met up with some of my fellow students to help the BYU Madrid study abroad professor's family move into the french professor's apartment for the weekend. Our professor and his family are in Madrid, so we aren't supposed to get into any trouble while they are gone haha.

Friday night/Saturday morning: Off to Nice!

It all started at 11:15 pm on Friday night with all of us girls meeting up to take the last RER to the airport. That night's sleep wasn't the best, half of us slept on the concrete and the other half tried to sleep around the handles on those chair-bench things. Plus there was a beep that went off every 15 seconds and a screaming child.... yeah we didn't really sleep. BUT it was totally worth it, because we spent all of Saturday at the beach and it was gorgeous!! The most perfect day at the beach ever. The water was perfect to cool off in and the rocks are actually really comfortable to lie on (but not really to walk on).

the water was perfectly calm and super clear

the sky!

the beach

this is what we did almost all day

walking around Nice!

Today was the complete opposite weather--a giant thunderstorm and pouring rain. We all got soaked but it felt good on our sunburns. We managed to find the church, and everyone was super nice to us. It was actually kind of a miracle that we found it, because we just went to the bus stop with the same name as the street and hoped it was close. Luckily Erin recognized that one of the guys on the bus was carrying a Gospel Principles manual so we just followed him haha. And we found it!

the start of the rain

in front of the church

After church we decided to go walk around Monaco. Which sounded like a great idea, except for the fact that it was a torrential downpour that went on for hours. Plus all of the grocery stores closed at noon. So it was definitely an adventure! But we managed to figure out the buses and make it there to spend an hour walking around before catching the last bus back to Nice.