Suntan lotion and language

After being in Nice for over a week I finally got the chance to swim in the Mediterranean! It is a twenty minute walk to the beach and my flatmates (four of us now) and I headed down earlier this week for an afternoon of sun and swimming :)

The beach in Nice is one long strip that runs along the famous 'Promenade des Angais' and the only down-side is that it is a pebble-beach so it really hurts your feet to walk - the key is to get in the water really quickly and start swimming - which is easy cause the water is so warm :) The sea is also a really deep turquoise blue - a bit lighter closer to shore and then deepening in colour the farther out it goes. It's stunning.

I was excited to wear my new green polka-dot bikini...which was conservative by French standards...there were at least three women on the beach with us who were completely topless. ;)

I love the area along the Promenade des Anglais. There are rows of palm trees, famous hotels, gelato shops, joggers, para-sailors and very tanned people (I wonder if I'll be that tanned by the end of the year). There is and even an old carousel which I absolutely had to ride as soon as I saw it - and dragged one of my flatmates with me. For some reason I get really excited about carousels and Ferris wheels.



Since arriving I've had a number of good opportunites to practise my language skills which has been great and has gone okay so far - except for a brief moment of total embarassment last night...

The four of us went to visit P, the final member of our team at her flat in another part of town. After have dinner there we walked over to a church nearby that held a weekly cafe in the evening where young people gathered to hang out and drink tea and coffee. This was a perfect chance to practise our introduction skills.

Near the end of the evening we were meeting a few more people that we hadn't met yet. Now I've been quite proud that my name (Rebecca) has a good 'R' to start with and I've felt quite French giving it a good roll as I introduce myself to people. I was thinking to myself at this point that I may have been rolling it a bit too forcefully and I decided to take this opportunity to perfect my pronunciation. I held out my hand as a girl came by to introduce herself and began with confidence "Je m'appelle R..." And THIS is where everything went wrong. For some reason as I nicely rolled my 'R' I got stuck on it and it came out as "Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr...rrrrrr.rrrrrr...(and 10 seconds later)...rrrbecca" So by the time I got to the end of my name my friends were laughing at me and the girl I was meeting had given up (she probably though that there was something wrong with me) and was introducing herself to the next person! So embarassing. I really don't know what went wrong. I think that after this I'll stick to introducing myself as just 'Becca' and skip the 'R' altogether :P