The Nice Carnival, Like Mardi Gras but Better

As the two-week stretch of Carnival in Nice from February to early March began to approach, I surveyed friends and colleagues to find out the best views on the parade route and any other insider's tips. Such inquiries were met with responses like, “Oh carnival? I went a few years ago. It’s alright,” or “It’s more for kids.”  While the Nice carnival doesn’t rank high among locals, the lack of enthusiasm may be due to the inconvenience it causes in shutting down city-center traffic. So I approached the festivities with low expectations and was pleasantly surprised.

To me the Nice carnival incorporates elements of the New Orleans Mardi gras like floats and parades without being drenched in the Bourbon street stench of beer and urine. Of course there isn’t Cajun food or French quarter jazz but Niçoise specialties like socca, a thin chickpea-flour pancake, and pissaldiere, a sort of onion and sardine topped pizza, are festival sustenance. The fast food at Rene Socca is the best reputed and its location, nestled into the old town a stone’s throw from the parade route, is convenient.

The Cote d’Azur one-ups swamp-riddled Louisiana geographically with an Yves Klein blue sea on one side of the frame and mountains on the other. Though beads and deblounes aren’t a part of the tradition in Nice, there’s none of the tacky flashing that goes with them either. Instead expect silly string and confetti showers from little trick or treaters. Children masquerade getting double duty out of Halloween costumes while for adults masks, hats, wigs or any over-the-top accessory goes.

The parade and floats travel in a circular route from the checkerboard place Massena down the seafront drag called the Promenade des Anglais and then back. Grandstands line the route but I followed the Best of Nice Blog’s advice to forego buying tickets and walk against the current.

Even though the theme changes each year, the larger than life paper maché characters always manage to look menacing. This year’s sports-centered parade was no exception with each red-eyed giant more nightmarish than the next but dancing hotdogs, blue birds on stilts, living dolls in red hoop skirts and block-long balloon dragons kept the atmosphere whimsical. Walking the whole route took a little more than an hour but I could have lingered for much longer.

When ready to vacate the premises the light rail can whisk you away to the train station because parking can be tedious during busy hours.

When everything has blown over the locals sigh their relief. The only telltale sign left behind after the grandstands are disassembled are strings of tinsel snagged in palm frond fingers making spring look a little like Christmas.

Paris from the vantage point of a worn green lawn chair
Parisians use the Tuileries like a backyard
for barefoot picnics and lazy afternoon sunbaths. 

I enjoyed the graceful, hollow-eyed dancers
of Mary Laurencin's canvases in the Orangerie. 
 

How Antibes Weathered the Storm

When the wind kicked up I walked down to the end of the street to greet the waves and my heart beat a little faster with each step closer to the sea. The old town is protected by ramparts, a good twenty feet tall in some sections, which wave crests surpassed pattering on restaurant terraces and the medieval facades. A wave could swallow me up in one lick, I thought, but I couldn’t pry my eyes off the violent sea. In a knee-length coat that caught gusts of wind I had to fight to hold my ground. With a strong enough umbrella I’m sure I could have traveled like Mary Poppins.

After a night of interrupted dreams when shutters hammer on windows, trees do backbends, and power lines are plucked like harp strings, things were relatively calm. With seaside roads closed by a layer of seaweed and branches, traffic stacked up on accessible roads. The weather continued in a pattern raging through the night but was well-mannered enough to abate come morning the whole week through.

The Cote d’Azur greeted by full November sun for the weekend began to assess damages. The beaches in Cannes and Juan les Pins got off easy ankle deep in sea weed. The restaurants that line the thin strip of beach operated unaffectedly serving full houses of sunglass clad clientele.

The beach in Antibes, however, more closely resembled a beaver dam, the sand hidden underneath branches. Trunks crowned by root canopies and logs as wide as car tires were stripped of their bark by the washing machine tumbling of the ocean. Many beachcombers walked back with arm-fulls of wood, some to feed fireplaces, others for artistic endeavors.

Amidst the carnage of the storm a faerie of driftwood forts has been erected that I’ve been to visit every day since discovering. I asked a brown headed ten year old on his hand and knees if I could enter. When he nodded yes I ducked inside and took a seat on a log. His mother explained, “We spent about two hours yesterday building the structure. When we came back this morning only a few of the logs had fallen.“ Her son continued to fence in a front yard burying the spear tips of snapped branches to stand perpendicular in the sand. Another little person was decorating a found playhouse with bits of plastic. “This is the kitchen,” he said as he gave me the tour.

I intend on making my own contribution to this collective work of art as the weeks wear on. Like all things ephemeral, there is a magic to not knowing how long the forts on the Pointeil beach will remain intact. It will undoubtedly take months to clear the debris.

Madame Grès - Musée Bourdelle, Paris

Luxembourg Garden Beehives

Salon Décoration Jardin et Art de Vivre
June in Aix-en-Provence

The Bataille des Fleurs Parade
















Life on the Cote d’Azur breeds finicky habitants accustomed to warmth and sun in year round doses. The appearance of several clouds or a kicking up of the wind is reason enough to denounce the weather and call off beach plans saying, “Il fait pas beau.” But despite the rain a crowd had amassed in the main square with appendages that spilled out onto the cobblestone streets of Antibes.
















Under awnings and umbrellas they awaited the Bataille des Fleurs, a parade that arrives in June like a right of passage into summer. Girls in lace up leather boots kicked in time with a marching band lead by Mickey and Minnie mouse in wedding white. At the head of the procession a brass section of aging Italian men in pink polka-dotted bikinis flirted with onlookers. Clowns and elephants rudely fashioned from carpets of flowers were pulled behind tractors. From these floats frilly-petalled carnations were showered on the crowd. A whole bouquet of roses that I caught by their thorny stems gave me a sense of why it’s called a battle of flowers.

My ear to eat smile outlasted the procession that wound its way down to the port where millionaires dock their yachts as I walked home with an armful of flowers like a pageant winner.