Day 16: Nice Knowing You

This morning we had a plan. It was to find the H&M in Nice. After eating Henriette's delicious hommade pancakes for breakfast we hit the shops. We asked girls on the street for directions to H&M and finally found our beloved store. Some great purchases were made to replace the appearance of our farm clothes. We swear none of these things could have been found in America.

Then we set out to find the restaurant where we would have our pre-planned huge french feast. We walked around checking every menu and basing our decision on the prices, how many people were eating at the restaurant, and how much sun was shining on the seats. After going into almost every restaurant in town we ended up just grabbing cheap pinini's and eating outside. We finally had the chance to put the Coke Light / Coke Zero test into action. Jaime failed her blind taste test and she concluded that they both taste exactly like Coke. I, however, continue to only buy Coke Light and Jaime only Coke Zero on principle.

This economically sound lunch enabled us to continue our gelato streak. We turned down one gelateria due to their "no sample" policy and found what has been the best gelato in France yet! Much more needs to be tasted.

We walked back to Henriette's in an attempt to burn off some of that gelato and see the city one last time. We entered a few grocery stores on the way to check out their peanut butter status. At this point we have come to terms with the unlikelihood of purchasing any peanut butter and are more collecting data for a future European peanut butter business. We did, however, buy cheap wine and delicious french bread for dinner. When we got back to henriette's she had another pancake-like treat ready for us before our travels to Montpellier.

So there is this really great travel service in France called Coiverterage, but to any average American it sounds a tad sketchy. Henriette showed us how frequently it is used throughout the country and set us up with a ride from Nice to Montpellier. Our driver, Mattheiu, was a very nice young gentleman who spoke a little English. He laughed at us when we told him that this kind of service would never work in America and he asked us to tell him if we had to "make pee-pee."

Three hours later we arrived in Montpellier and got dropped at the Tram. the Tram ride to our hotel was rediculously long, but gave us more time to discuss all the wonderful things about French public transportation, such as the frequented butt rests. We finally arrived at our stop and headed off to find the Buffalo grill, the only landmark we could understand on the phone.

The Prime Hotel was not so prime. We entered through the back door as a creepy woman onlooker lurked behind us. We searched the hotel for the place that they hid our keys. We found many hidden keys, but all with other names on them. We thought maybe the hotel guy got our name wrong so we took one of the keys and checked out the room. Since the name "Dreamline" was nothing close to "Goldstein" we left our stuff in the room and continued to search for OUR keys.
Finally we found keys hidden in a second floor wall pannel labeled "Joldstin". No wonder he was having trouble getting our email addresses right. Now that we had they keys to our real room we had to get our stuff out of "Dreamline's" room and return the keys to their hidding place. Easier said than done when you have creppy woman onlooker popping out of random doors.

When we finally got all of our stuff to our room via mission impossible style it was too late to head back into the city. Trapped, we decided to watch Scrubs in french in our surprisingly comfortable bed.
Our two bottles of wine will have to wait until tomorrow.

-J and C