holiday 4 - odds and sods

So this is the odds and sods round-up for the holiday.

The weather was hot. Very hot. Think as hot as it gets in the UK and this was only May, so I can't guess what it's like in mid-summer.

I got the crap burnt out of me - the holiday was a couple of weeks ago and I'm still peeling. Indeed, I stopped peeling and then started again, presumably as more damaged layers of skin made their way to the surface :/.

Unfortunately, all the weather forecasts I'd looked at beforehand hinted there may be rain, so I'd not really packed exclusively for HOT weather - I even had a jumper! But this also meant I didn't think about sun cream.

But what made the temperature worse was the humid. It was horribly oppressive. As part of the Kangaroo system you can get the track stats and on the Saturday it said it was over 70% humidity. The tour guide said he'd never known anything like it and he goes every year.

Overall, it was too much for me. Sun lovers would have been in their element I'm sure, but I find heat like that unpleasant.

I've no idea how the French road system works. Bizarrely it appeared that when the pedestrian lights turned green cars could still turn into that road. This seemed very dangerous as it put cars and pedestrians in direct conflict.

But the French clearly ignore all of the traffic signals and rules of the road anyway (how very French of them!).

It does seem to mean that horns become an integral part of the French way of driving. It was driving me and my Dad bonkers all the horn beeping. In England someone would have thumped them for honking their horns all the time.

However, what really took me surprise (and in contrast to this) was how nice everyone was. As an example, when we were examining the trams to see how they worked an old lady wandered over and, in very good English, explained it all to us.

When I was at school I did GCSE French. Languages and their intricacies are a long way from my comfort zone, but I did okay in the end. Obviously, being basically a trip to France, this potentially meant I'd need to exercise my French and those GCSEs were getting on for half a lifetime ago now.

Still I was impressed with how much I remembered. Although I was more impressed with how much English was generally spoken. I guess part of this is that Nice and the like are big holiday towns so they get a lot of tourists.

We also used the French rail system. My impression is a bit of a mixed bag.

One of the things that's very obvious is that they have lots of people on the platforms - ticket attendants, help, guards, etc. On British platforms you're lucky to see anyone who works their.

But as such, rather than have automated announcements, you're supposed to ask them. On British platforms there's regular, automated announcements and a far better board system. A classic example was when we went to Cannes our proper train pulled in on a different platform and there were no announcements at all!

However, the service is a lot cheaper (it's massively subsidised) and what you get is better. There are loads of stops and loads of different types of service - fast ones and stopping. Also they have these double-decker trains so there's loads more seating and it was mostly nice, new stuff.

Plus, the commy bastards had a bloody strike while we were there. And it appeared to be a strike that was essentially about nothing in particular.

So yeah - mixed bag.

I'll hopefully be posting pics later - I'm focused more on clearing this scanning backlog at the moment, so it may be next week. Oh and the Japanese mags did turn up yesterday. Signs would indicate the courier did have problems, but I'm not sure why, as the addresses on the packages were definitely correct :/.