Sticking our heads out of the boxes: "Look! There's the French Riviera!"

Villefranche-sur-mer (Nice is behind the hill) around Easter

Coming from Denmark, Winter in the South of France is pretty mild. Spring down here is almost like the Danish summer!

We did our best to not forget amidst our installation that we were living in a place where people typically go for their vacation :-)

On April 9 (according to the picture file dates) we actually dined out on the terrasse of a wine and cheese bar on the harbor in Nice.

Enjoying cheese and wine on the harbor in early April!

Beaches, coves and bays which tend to be crowded with people, boats, and jet skis in the summer were stunningly still. Didn't expect the contrast would be so drastic! In the town Villefranche-sur-mer that we both like very much, we could hear the wind in the shrouds while walking along the harbor...

On the beach in Villefranche-sur-mer in early April

The bay from Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat to Monaco is free from boats...

Walking along the coastline in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat at sunset

The harbor at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in early April

Wisteria flowers in full bloom by a fountain close to our apartment

The moon showing her pale face over palm trees in Nice

The unpacking process: When will our home be free of cardboard boxes?

Now, with our move (finally!) into a more permanent place, we were able to ask the moving company to resume with transporting our stuff from Denmark down to Nice (it had been stored somewhere in the UK while we were sorting out our apartment situation). Then the question became when our stuff would actually make it down here.

Two months after the movers showed up in Aarhus, they made their way into Nice. Their super long lorry actually was not authorized to get to our place downtown, for security reason. There's actually a law about that in the whole city of Nice, and apparently cops are pretty good at enforcing it, since they use video cameras to watch traffic in town.

The drivers knew about this (it was their 3rd time driving to Nice with an over-sized truck!), but failed to tell us so until the day they actually arrived, which was only a day before our scheduled delivery. They would not get a tip for failing to figure that out ahead of time but Q spent his afternoon trying to sort this out via phone calls to various authorities in town, and the most helpful info came from a car rental agency in Nice. We learned it was actually possible to park the truck at some dispatch center on the outskirts and we rented a smaller vehicle for the movers to transit our stuff from the lorry to our apartment.

The over-sized truck parked on the outskirts of Nice

Fortunately, our belongings did not fill up that truck at all (only about 1/6th of it) so it took only two trips for the movers to get all our stuff.

The truck is getting emptied of our stuff...

We were glad to see our belongings again, even though we were both quite tired of seeing again so many cardboard boxes, some of them dating back to our move from Boulder 2.5 years earlier — yeah, we've been that good with recycling boxes! We can now also confirm our original hypothesis that the sturdier boxes were the ones that had been used to ship solvent bottles to the Chem store at CU Boulder  and that we had been saving over our last months in Colorado :-)

An example of a box that we've been carrying around since our time in Boulder...

Moving is so much fun! Or maybe I am smiling cause laughing was the only way to keep our sanity!

That was back in late May. Four months later we've gotten rid of most boxes, but we still have a few persistant ones, mostly cause we haven't found the proper furniture to organize their content yet!

Picking up where we left off: Meeting some waves upon settling down in Nice

Well, sorry it's been a while, but the moving process hasn't been as smooth as we had hoped, even though it hasn't been completely terrible either!

The first issue was that the agency which is managing the apartment we had picked in Nice was just inflexible regarding having someone with a long-lasting credit history in France guarantee the lease. Q's parents could be of help with that formality, but unfortunately the agency also insisted that the person would come to Nice to sign the lease with us. Timing was not optimal for them (Q's parents).

So we decided to pick another apartment at the last minute, and we asked the moving company that had our stuff from Aarhus to put it in storage until we'd found a new place.

Where we almost moved (top left 3 windows) but ended up staying only for a week

We did find a new apartment, larger, with brand new hardwood floors, a nice sunny balcony, well located, in a more quiet street, but still within the same neighborhood. We moved in knowing that the apartment would require some painting work before being completely livable — we did not see ourselves enjoying for very long walls which had been painted 20 years ago with yellow glossy paint, neither did we like the cheesy wallpaper mural ;-) We thought we had understood we would get financial support from the owner to do that work (expenses amounted to at least 1,000 EUR). But once we moved in, the son with whom we had interacted up to that point was replaced by his dad who was the actual owner, and thus the final decision maker. And he was not willing to help us as we had expected.

Oops. That was our second issue.

Glossy yellow paint and now grey baseboards

The mural: Did that ever look nice?

How did we solve that one? The owner gave us two options: 1. "You paint and I will fix the ceiling in the hallway" — oh yeah! let's not forget about the ceiling... Over 25 years ago the landlord had covered the ceiling in the hallway with some linen in order to "mask the pipes" at the request of the tenant at that time. Of course the cloth was dirty and dusty after that much time, so we had removed it with the plan to paint what was covered instead. Option #2: "You can stay until the end of the month in order to find another place [we were in early April] and you get your money back".

C and I thought the paintwork amounted to more than what tenants should be asked to do (even though in France it is more or less expected that paintwork is up to the tenant and not the landlord), because moldings on the ceiling needed to be painted as well, paint chips were coming off the heaters, and so forth.

Furthermore, we were both feeling uneasy about having been caught in between a son and his dad from the outset, and we did not feel very comfortable either that the apartment was geographically located precisely in between the dad's house and the son's apartment. We could actually see them on their respective balconies on both sides, and they had a full view on quite a few of our windows. Talk about privacy!

So our feeling was that instead of asking for a rent of 1,000 EUR per month, the owner and his son should probably agree with each other to do the renovation work and then just increase the rent to 1,200 EUR or more — the actual rent of most places that size in that part of town. Had they done that, we would just not have been interested on the first place.

Too much work if we're just renting!

Hence, we decided to accept proposition number two, and all went smoothly with the landlord from then on. We just had to move out our stuff again, which we had just moved from C's former studio or that we had recently ordered. That included new appliances, such as a washing machine, a fridge, and an oven. We hired somebody for that! We found ourselves crammed in the little studio until a new solution would present itself...

We were back to square one — still without an apartment to move into — but we knew we had made the right decision when the owner called Q one day and asked him to "please close the shutters when you leave so that the sun would not damage the new hardwood floors"... We also came across the guy who would have been our neighbor and he told us he was sad we were not staying, but then he also told us about his "battle" with the landlord after water damage from the roof that the landlord did not want to take responsibility for.

"Sun-sensitive" hardwood floors ;-)

Fortunately, by the end of this mini-saga, we were close to the Easter vacation in France. Q called up one of his very best friends in Eastern France, and she actually ended up being the one who would guarantee the lease for the first apartment we had considered. She and her family were looking for a beach vacation, so why not Nice and helping us out at the same time. Needless to say we are eternally grateful for their gesture!

So we signed together for the apartment I am writing this blog post from!

More about that on the next post (and with a few more waves...).

Apricot pie by the balcony of our apartment in Nice

Everything's just... gone!!

All our stuff just left Aarhus for Nice this morning. Quite a big step toward home reunification! Two great guys from a British moving company came to load their truck with our > 400 cubic feet (=12 cubic meters) of stuff. We took some snapshots of the process.

7:55am: It's good we had reserved 3 parking spots in a row for the movers' truck to park!

8:00 am: Here's what the living room of our apartment in Aarhus looks like...

8:47am: Time for a painting yoga session in one of the now empty bedrooms

9:08am: This is definitely clearing out...

9:53am: A lot of our stuff is now stacked inside the truck

10:10am: Hey! we can start seeing some of that back wall again behind the cardboard boxes that we had not seen in 3 months

10:38am: Each of our 150 items got a colored sticker with a unique identifier and was added to a now 6-page list

10:49am: Almost there...

11:15am: Time to wave the truck goodbye... (check out at one of the windows on the third floor ;)

It'll take about 2 weeks now we think before we see our belongings again down at the other end in Nice. Stay tuned!

Orchids in Menton, Aloevera flowers in Antibes, and the Sun, well... everywhere :)

For his latest trip to visit C and S on the Cote d'Azur, Q arrived as a perfect French gentleman on Valentine's day. He stayed a week, and the aims for those few days were to (1) find an apartment to move into for April 1st, and (2) check out the carnaval de Nice (a >100 year old tradition) and the 79th edition of the Lemon festival in Menton (to celebrate the historical Menton lemon).

Since early February, we called about 15 apartments, visited 6, had a close tie between two, and eventually decided to stay in a 75 m2 apartment close to the tram line, our favorite boulangerie, and the largest (and daily) open air market, in a relatively tourist-free part of Nice. Both of us really liked the apartment, its feel, and the fact that we'd be the only folks on our floor, in a 4-story house filled with quiet families. We've already met the downstairs neighbor, her two cats and her cute and friendly dog. We're definitely looking forward to being reunited under the same roof again!

Stay tuned for more pictures of the new place, and in the meantime, here's one of the living room in our current apartment in Denmark...

So mission 1 accomplished! Now regarding the leisure activities by the Mediterranean... Well, actually, to much of our dismay—yet not too unexpectedly in that part of France—the festivals in Nice and Menton turned out to be mostly commercial, geared toward tourists and kids. In Nice, we were at the opening night of the carnaval and it was just a lot of hot air. And the Queen of the carnaval was half the size of the King, of course dressed in pink and not at all sporty (sport was the theme for 2012)...

"We just love Americans - check out where we placed their flag!"

A very dancing fairy Queen...

In Menton, the focus was to a large extent on a gigantic exhibit, much amusement park-oriented, with tall structures made out of lemons. Although the festival claims to promote "nature and culture", all the lemons displayed here (145 tons) were actually shipped from Spain (see official source - in French). That's not much of a way to promote sustainability! Needless to say that took the fun out of it for us...

Spanish lemons and oranges in Menton

The only events that were organized to actually promote the local culture of lemons were unfortunately very limited. A visit of a traditional "citronneraie" (orchard where lemons grow) happened on certain days only, through a guided tour exclusively at 10am, for which we showed up too late in Menton to be able to join. We did visit a cute orchard with a large variety of citrus fruits surrounding a museum, but no informations, explanations or products derived from the fruits were available.

Most traditional lemon orchards have actually disappeared in Menton due to the booming of real estate, but a few farmers are bringing the old tradition back and the town is aiming to get its famous lemon recognized and protected. 15 producers are actually growing lemons now, and the town has planted over 5000 lemon trees in the 1990s (resource in French). We really looked for ways we could support that movement, but it was hard to find how.

While in Menton we still enjoyed walking around this cute town we both like, and we saw a very fine orchid exhibit, a few photos of which are displayed here.

Orchid exhibit in Menton

On the Sunday we decided to take the train and go West from Nice instead of East (Villefranche, Saint Jean, Menton, Monaco, Italy, etc.) where we usually go. We aimed for the quaint town of Antibes, a mere 20 minute train ride from the main train station in Nice. We loved the winding picturesque streets and the overlook on the Mediterranean and the Cap d'Antibes from the old castle Grimaldi which is now a Picasso museum. What's very particular about that museum is that most of Picasso's artwork on display was actually created by the master himself in the room where it is now on exhibit, back in 1946 (click on a flag for translation).

The French Riviera just ain't bad...

Not tan yet in 2012 but working on it!

Some fine dining again that evening, and another quick visit to Villefranche the next day before flying back North and wondering why on Earth was "North" ever invented... Perhaps for the contrasting beauty of pine forests mooring into a frozen sea and sunsets that can last a whole hour...