Pizza and Crêpe

One of the best things about Nice so far is the people watching. The city is very busy all day (and night too in our neighborhood!) Yesterday I tried out three different locations for their people-watching potential:

#1 Sitting outside the back balcony (in our very own apartment!) while having breakfast. Our second floor balcony looks onto high apartments with rows and rows of pastel coloured shuttered windows – some closed and some open. Every now and again someone would wander out onto their balcony to see what the day is like. One woman next door even came out with a vanity mirror to apply her makeup by sunlight. I knew that anyone could be watching me too from any of those hundreds of window…although I still decided to lick the last bit of mango yogurt from the bottom of my bowl.:)

#2 From a café: My Welsh flatmate (I’ve decided to adopt this British term) and I went for real French espresso at a café near our flat. It took a while to decide what to have from the menu: café, café restaurant, noisette (don’t know what this is yet), cappuccino, grand café etc. We both were curious about the café restaurant and ordered that – but were told that it was the same thing a café anyway. We turned our chairs to face the street (French style) and watch people shop at the market and pointed out who looked like tourists and who did not. I’m sure that we both still fall into the tourist category.

#3 Having dinner on our front balcony: After cooking our first dinner in our apartment (rice and stir-fry) we decided to eat it on our table outside in the front. Our apartment is also very hot and outside is a lot cooler!
Across the street there is a ‘Pizza and Crêpe’ shop that was entertaining to watch. The three employees would spend their time sitting out side, looking bored, chatting, folding pizza boxes and sometimes getting into heated arguments with cars that would try to park in front of their store and disturb their garbage bin – lots of yelling and hand waving!
Three motorbikes with red boxes on the back also sat out front and occasionally one employee would jump into action and speed off for a delivery but return in just a few minutes. Most of the time though, they seemed really bored…we were tempted to order a pizza (or crepe!) ourselves to give them something to do.
It wasn’t until later I noticed that we were also being watched - the man in the balcony above us to the right would also pop his head over with his cigarette too see what we were up to as well.

So far my favourite is #3.