Cannes, Antibes & More Tripe…

Today we visited Cannes, famous for its film festival in May, and found that there’s not much there but a lot of private beaches you have to pay to go onto!  Personally, I’d much rather vacation in the Caribbean if I’m looking for a beach – the water is more blue, the sand is soft, and the beaches are mostly free!

Like usual, all shops were closed today because it’s Sunday, so the walk from the train station to the promenade by the beach was very quiet, but once we got close to the promenade we found lots of people eating at the various restaurants and shopping at a big flea market that was going on.  Because we couldn’t decide on a restaurant for lunch, we ended up getting burgers at a stand right in front of the beach, which was kind of a bad idea because they don’t cook the burger meat all the way through here!  We had read about this prior to coming, but the thought slipped our mind when we were ordering and we weren’t sure how or if we could ask them to re-cook the patty when we bit in and saw pink, so we just ate the majority of our burgers and threw out the really uncooked parts.  Neither of us got sick so I guess it was ok, but we won’t be ordering burgers again!

After hanging out on the free public area of the beach for a while watching kids do flips, we headed off to Antibes, where we found more yachts and more rock beaches.  We noticed that a lot of yachts at the dock here had “for sale” signs on them, but we’re not sure if this is because of the recession or the yacht show that happened to be taking place today (although the yacht show was happening across the water on the other side of town).  The boats here aren’t quite as big and impressive as the ones in Monaco, but I could live with a nice little boat!

We checked out the shore where the yacht show was happening and then headed back to Nice for dinner to try another restaurant the English guys we met at Le Toscan had recommended since their first recommendation, Voyageur Nissart, was so good.  This restaurant, called L’Escalinada, was in the old town area and it was the first restaurant we’ve been to in Nice that doesn’t mainly do set menus (i.e. appetizer, main course and dessert), so we just ordered main dishes for a change and it was actually more than enough food!  Because the English guys had gone on and on about how tripe is a specialty food in Europe (they were surprised that I eat tripe and I was surprised someone not Asian ate tripe), I decided to give the tripe on the menu a try even though I still have bad memories from Portugal.  The waiter asked me if I knew what tripe was (hah!) and shortly after we had ordered, I had in front of me the biggest bowl of tripe stew possible!  There must have been like 5 servings in that thing!  This time it tasted much better than in Portugal and it was actually a mixture of cow stomach and tripe, but it was far too much food for one person and Paul hates tripe so half of the bowl went to waste. While I’m still a fan of tripe, there is only so much of it I can eat at once so I don’t think I’ll be ordering it again unless I’m really craving it! Overall feeling – L’Escalinada was good, but Voyageur Nissart was better by far!