October Break (Part 4)!

Today I walked to the beach of Nice, France. The city was all right but the beach was very interesting because there was a whole section that I happened upon that completely surprised me. There were hundreds of huge white rocks haphazardly scattered along one stretch of the shore. They were not just normal rocks though. They had no doubt been cut by someone, a artist or a company with some kind of plan I am unaware of, into irregular geometric shapes. All of these impressive pieces of rock were stacked on top of each other and a little further from the shore were big slabs of cubic rock beside a tall cobblestone wall. First I fell asleep in a little crevice of the scattered geometric rocks and then I walked along the cubes towards another section of the beach that was strewn with similar flat sided stones but smaller and each with two rusted handles stuck to different sides. On the way to those smaller stones, I tripped on one of the gaps between the cubic rocks next to the cobblestone wall and landed on my knee, bruising it and only slightly breaking the skin. I hurt my wrists a little but it wasn't too bad. My two pairs of glasses also flew off my head in the abrupt, unexpected act, probably caused by my state of recent nap delirium and a man walked by shortly after, pointing to one of the sunglass lenses that had fallen out of its frame. I said, "I know...thank you," and shook myself out of it, also stretching my fingers and bending my wrist to make sure my arms were ok.

Did I mention that I had hot chocolate before this and at first it was amazing but then I realized that somehow the girl who made it failed to notice that there were several small pieces of paper mixed into the drink? The paper was hard to rip though so I figured that the hot chocolate melted off some of the thick paper cup and the pieces ended up in my mouth. At first I thought they were just clumps of powdered chocolate but soon I realized that wasn't the case. I was reminded of when I was really young and on multiple occasions, either caused by my drive to impress someone like a disgusted friend at school or simply because of my typical curiosity for indulging my senses with new things, I ate little bits of paper.

I went to a modern art museum today. That was interesting. Like usual modern art museums, or any art museums for that matter, I was very unimpressed with some things but really entranced by others. My favorite was a sculpture of man in the middle of the room, caught in the act of dancing his heart out. The great thing about it was that his eyes were closed and his face was unusually placid. It seemed to me that someone with their head swung back and one leg up in the air would at least show some kind of similar, active movement in their face. But this guy was INTO it. Almost like he was meditating while dancing. Maybe a professional dancer.

I didn't get a chance to swim cause it was getting pretty damn cold by the time I was at the beach and ready to relax. The art museum was before I scraped my knee. When I finally got to the regular beach with small rocks (there wasn't a typical sand beach where I was), I just sat there with sorbet and a coke light and wrote musical ideas on the back of my Barcelona Film Festival voucher. I also skipped a couple rocks on the water. It was nice but then it came time to walk back.

I forgot to mention that back in Cinque Terre, at the last beach, I had to swim because it was such a beautiful day and I had told myself that I had no choice but to do it. The problem was that I didn't have a swim suit. So in front of Nerese (pronounced like Maurice but with an "n") and Shelly, I stripped to my boxers. The swim was incredibly refreshing and pretty. When I was finished swimming, I realized after stepping out of the water that I forgot to consider the downside of wearing WHITE polka-dot boxers. Yeah, so they were pretty much see through. Shelley told me that no one was watching and to not worry about it. I pulled part of the boxers away from my skin as I walked out in front of people and picked up my clump of clothes, retreating to an area pretty far away from my friends. My feet were all sandy and I didn't want to get my pants really messy so I had to put one foot at a time on this small rock on the beach so that while I put one wet (but clean!) foot into my pants, the other wouldn't be standing on sand. I had a difficult time doing this and was afraid I would fall into the water and ruin everything. I also figured that Matt, Nerese and Shelley were watching and laughing at me or even rooting for the waves to somehow trip me. I found out when I got back that they were actually not looking my way the whole time. Or so they say. But then after my pants nestled close to my wet underwear after a couple minutes, the girls decided to point at me and laugh about how it looked like I peed my pants. It's true. I laughed with them and was happy that I swam even though I knew this would happen.

Tomorrow is mainly train travel and a taste of Barcelona once I get there at eight at night. Let's hope I can catch some of the film festival then. Saturday is all Barcelona. The day after is my flight back to Athens.

S!