Antibes & Juan les Pins – Last Day in France

May 25, 2012 – So I went and changed my mind and transferred most of the text from the trip back over here to the travel blog to keep it all together. It had just been a year since this blog had been active and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it. What is it they say? A woman retains the right to change her mind?

We had considered going to Monaco, but with the trains being unpredictable due to staff action, we decided to stick close to home. We did get up early again today, but this time we took a short train ride into Antibes (we could have walked but our feet were still hurting from all the walking yesterday). We headed straight for the market and found a cafe for a typical French breakfast – orange juice, coffee, croissant, pain de chocolat. Yum!

After that we wandered through the market and enjoyed the sights, sounds, and smells. Fresh fruits and vegetables, fragrant herbs and spices, soaps, pastries, meats, cheeses, olives, candied fruits, and a fish monger with fish fresh from the waters in the bay, still glistening and taking their last gasps. A man was filleting a couple of perch for a woman, and another man was deftly removing the gonads and entrails from several sea urchins, tossing the entrails to a seagull while carefully keeping the gonads aside – a delicacy that just doesn’t appeal to me. A fabulous and very large monkfish occupied its own basket in all its glorious ugliness. As I leaned down to take some photos of the monkfish, an older Frenchman began speaking to me animatedly about the fish. He didn’t speak English and he didn’t seem to care that my French was terrible. I thought he’d give up, but I suppose when I made an attempt he decided my understanding was better than my speaking skills. I did catch probably about 20% of what he was saying though. He was explaining to me what a delicacy the monkfish is, and explained to me that it is itself a fisherman. It helped that I play charades well when I already know the answer. The basket of tiny fish contained everything from two small parrotfish, a few small eels, and some tiny perch. He was trying to explain their purpose, and I thought he meant for bouillabaisse, but that was shot down and what I think he was trying to tell me is that they are used for fish stock for soup. I couldn’t imagine any other purpose for them as they were so small.

We purchased some wonderful French milled soaps at a shop filled with many other things we would have loved to bring home, but couldn’t. Fresh conserves, freshly cured olives in herbs and oil, absinthe, pour your own volume olive oils from regional areas. So many wonderful things! Kirk asked about absinthe since they sold if, and the shopkeeper brightened up and pulled out two bottles of differently distilled varieties for us to try. He poured us each a small glass and blended it with a sugared water to cut the bitterness, and then sent us down a spiral staircase to visit an absinthe “cave” below. The rock walled room was small and dim, with closely crowded tables and memorabilia on the walls. Absinthe is an anise flavoured liqour, very strong, that has a long history as France’s national drink, and was associated with artists the likes of Vincent van Gogh. A woman working in the shop explained to us that absinthe was outlawed in 1914 and only became legal again in France one year ago. I didn’t mind it, but then I like Sambuca and Absinthe isn’t that far away in the liquor family. Checked that off the to-do list!

After that we just wandered the shops for a bit, until noon or so, bought a few odds and ends, saw a woman posing for a clay sculpture (fabulous work!), and then walked slowly back to Juan les Pins where we stopped for a glass of wine and a panini. We then hunted for a patisserie where I finally checked my last item off the to-do list – savour a Mille feuille, one of my all time favourite pastries, and I’ve never had one as good as the ones I remember from France when I was here as a teenager. The French simply do flaky pastry in a way that no one else can. Delicate, perfectly balanced, not too sweet, not overly cloying, just perfect.

We wandered through a park, found a line of clay tiles with hand prints bearing the names of Jazz musicians that have played here, names like Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Pat Metheny were among the ones we recognized. We walked along the beach, stuck our toes in the sand and splashed through the water, and then made our way to our hotel to sit on the patio and enjoy some wine as the afternoon sky started to darken threateningly. We had some thunder and lightening, and a little bit of rain and wind.

When it subsided we headed off to find a place for dinner. We walked into the town centre before remembering a seafood restaurant back a block of two from our hotel on the waterfront. We walked back there and Kirk said “watch, it won’t be open!” He jinxed us, it wasn’t, but it did say that it opened at 7pm. Remember that I said finding dinner can be a crapshoot? The pizza place we ate at on our first night here hasn’t been open since, my guess is that they are only open Friday/Saturday/Sunday. Others seem to be open or not completely at random. So the reality is, when you ask where should we eat, the answer should be “wherever happens to be open at the moment.” Dinner was too much food, we should have ordered a single dish from the menu instead of ordering from the set menus which are four courses. We didn’t finish. Like I said before, the food is expensive here, but they don’t scrimp on portions anywhere that we went. We ended up taking half the bottle of wine with us – they put it into a nice carrier bag to go – and finished it up in the room as we packed.

The hotel owner ordered a car for us for the morning, and we have a very early flight out.

We did a lot, I wouldn’t really call it a relaxing trip, there was so much we wanted to stuff into such a short period of time, but overall, the South of France has been wonderful and we can’t wait to come back.