Today we walked down to the Promenade to the tourist office and bought tickets for the Flower Parade on Saturday that is part of the Carnivale celebration here.

After walking along the promenade for a ways, we then walked through a market that had lots of flowers, some vegetables and other food stuffs, like a very small Pike Place for you Seattleites.

We went up through Old Town to a ‘fast food’ place called Cafe Rene’. There were glass cases with various prepared foods and then at the end of the line a huge round cast iron griddle of socca. There was quite a line of people waiting and Don and Frankie said it was like that all day and into the night. One of the best places for ‘fast food’ in Nice.

Socca is like a flatbread made of chickpea flour, water, olive oil, and salt. Courtney and I got into making it last year when Darrel was sick and supposed to be cutting back on white flour products. It is crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. So, I had been looking forward to having it here!

We got several small plates of food. Fried eggplant (fried in breadcrumbs), small pieces of fried fish (more of a beer batter), a small pizza with cheese, olives and an anchovy, and socca. The total bill was 13 euros and we couldn’t eat it all. There was seating outside along the building and a small covered cafe area with a bar.

At the Cafe Rene’ for Socca and wine.

Next, we walked to the port area and looked at the boats and yachts. It had a lot of great apartments all around the area, and on one side had several cafes. We stopped at one and had glasses of wine (of course.) Then walked back a different way to the apartment.

We sat around a few hours resting and all of us on our devices checking mails and Facebook and sharing fun things with each other.

We had made dinner reservations during our walk through Old Town at one of Don and Frankie’s favorite restaurants. It is a family run place with mom, dad, and their three gorgeous sons. The are well known for the Nicoise specialties, Restaurant Acchiardo.

Dinner on Thursday. Great food and fabulous service

We started with a Nicoise specialty entree of Petit Farcis Nicois which was vegetables (pepper, onion, eggplant, tomato, and zucchini) stuffed with a mixture of ground veal or beef. Very tasty.

I had Daube with spinach gnocchi. The daube is very slow cooked, tender beef in a wine sauce similar to pot roast. It was a huge plate and I could only eat about half.

Don had his favorite, Escalope Milanese. A thinly pounded, breaded piece of veal with lemon and frites (french fries.)

And Frankie had Dourade Provencal. Sea bream in a tomatoey sauce with Haricots Verts (green beans.) It was funny because when he pronounced it in French, I was like, what was that? It sounds totally different than the way I always thought it was pronounced!

We had two bottles of wine with the meal, a house brand of Rose’. And we were getting a little giggly by the end of those.

Frankie and I ended the meal with an espresso and Don had his favorite, ice cream topped with espresso.

There was another couple that came in and were sitting a little way from us who started a conversation with us. After shouting across a couple of times, Don went over to chat with them. Frankie said they must be Australian (accent) because only Americans and some other non-French people would yell at each other across a restaurant like that. It was pretty funny. They owned an apartment in Old Town and spent 6 months there and traveled the world the rest of the time. Hmmm, maybe I should do that!

We stopped at a really interesting bar for a night cap. It had very cool decor. Paintings on the wall up by the ceiling of scenes from India, fans that were half-circles that went up and down, not around interspersed with oil lamps that had been electrified. Very cool. Lots of laughter at our table!

The bar

Carnivale decorations

A statue of Apollo in a fountain surrounded by horses. It is not running now while the carnivale celebration is going on.

Funny story about the Apollo statue – it was taken down in the 50s for about 30 years because his balls were too big. Some of the local men politicians probably were jealous!

Came back to the apartment and had more drinks (not that we needed them by this point) and chatted for a couple of hours.

Today is cloudy and cool, darn it! I think we are going to venture into another town nearby. And tonight we got to the gay carnivale celebration.