day4-buttery smell, soggy umbrella hunt, Godzilla Nicoise

After a delightful encounter with the hotel's four-legged hairy inhabitant--a Siamese cat, whose striking resemblance to Patrick's cross-eyed Sweetie Pie reminded us of home-sweet-home, we headed for a bakery the helpful lady of the hotel recommended for breakfast. The initial blinding brightness that speared our eyes upon coming out of the dim stairwell quickly receded, for it was yet another day of thick cloud cover, mixed with sporadic showers. The bakery was only a minute's walk from the hotel, facing a little plaza shiny with rain on stone-paved surface. Once inside, overwhelming aroma of butter struck our nostrils, torturing our hungry stomachs, as our eyes were under severe attack from vibrant colors of glazed fruits on boats of pastries. It took us a few minutes to order an apple pie and a pear pie, because of not only our hopeless French (coupled with unhelpful self-esteem) but also their incredible selection of pastries, croissants, crusty bread, quiche, and so many other temptations I don't know the names of. From our corner table, we watched an endless stream of customers coming in for a couple of baguettes, a bagful of croissants, or for a morning hot chocolat and a toast with an abundant helping of apricot preserve. The pies were excellent: the crust golden and flaky, the fruits fresh and full of flavor. We were still missing big steaming mugs of American coffee, however. Our espresso lasted only for three or four sips, leaving an insatiable desire for more.

We definitely needed to find an umbrella for Patrick. The past two days was enough to teach us to expect more grey days with unpredictable patches of rain during our stay in France. Plus, the insufficient rain gear had proven to be a very good way to transform me into a whining child with a foul mouth and a typical reluctance to explore and appreciate. Our educated guess took us back to the station. After a considerable walking around the rotary, it became apparent that there was only one shabby-looking store that had umbrellas. It was typical of stores in front of a resort station serving both the locals with no taste whatsoever and the tourists, desperately in need of a replacement luggage or, like us, an umbrella, who otherwise would never imagine shopping anything in such a pathetic store. A white-painted metal wagon was pulled out under the awning, with all stripes of cheap umbrellas piling up. It was hard to imagine that in the present day of two thousand and four, there is anybody who manufactures umbrellas with horrible patterns in even more horrible color combination--one, to give only a glimpse of the horrifying pile, had a beige-colored fake wood handle, checker pattern printed in pink, yellow, and deep green zigzag lines against a navy background, and of course, the bones were painted gleaming gold. There were, of course, other staples of a store of this kind: zebra-lined tee shirts that would go perfectly well with the panther-dotted fabric of the trunks on wheels. Patrick picked up a plain black folding one after a long digging, sighing, and thinking. It was barely large enough to cover him, but it was not screaming, "Look at me!! I have such a horrible taste!! I'm a mummy resurrected from the '60s!!" like other ones did. For a short while I suffered from a bad flashback of painfully obsolete "fashion" stores of my hometown in the Far East.

Finally fully armed against the unpredictable French weather, we started marching to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice. More or less fruitful yet definitely time-consuming hunt for the umbrella, aggravated by the fact that our hotel, the station, and the MMCA are scattered in the town, however, had made our spirit somewhat soggy. My verbal attempts to keep our spirits from crumbling to the wet ground had started to sound hollow. We needed to truly start our day--one dedicated to the real tourist activity, untainted with trivial concerns.

MMCA, with a glittering monster stomping around its elevated front plaza, by the hands of a female sculptor with a long exotic name I wish I could remember, did the trick. A staircase led us to a circular courtyard surrounded by a column-shaped, charcoal-colored building of the museum with a hollow space at the center (where the courtyard is). The dramatic entrance was followed by a number of coloful scuoptures scattered around in the slate-paved courtyard. Looking up, each of the big curved glass windows of the museum were decorated with different kind of artworks--one with a great number of small chairs painted blue, other with (again) an astronomical number of rusting metal shovels, sickles, and giant scissors. In the ample space inside, the collection was very enjoyable and extensive, ranging from paintings to video installations to a crushed car from the '50s. Dry and entertained, our spirits came back to their usual height again. Now we needed food.


shiny monster of Nice
Originally uploaded by uBookworm.