France 2018 – Day 4 – Wednesday – Nice and Monaco

Some days of touring with Meredith are a gamble, but she usually comes out a winner. You may walk, say, 13.7 miles in a day, but she has good things to go see. And, as a bonus, you can usually count on sleeping well that night.

Today, Mer let me sleep in until 8:00 am, with us meeting the rest of the group in the lobby at 9:30. Mer wanted to go see the Marc Chagall museum, and that did not open until 10:00 – thus the late start. We walked to the museum, which turned out to be up on a hill, causing some panting. Sometimes, you do have to suffer for your art. We got there right after 10:00 and got into the museum with a plan to meet back together at 11:30, since the free audio guide was supposed to take about an hour.

The Marc Chagall museum started out as the Biblical Message Museum, housing seventeen huge paintings on Biblical stories that Chagall donated to France, with the condition the government build a museum to house them. So Chagall got to be the first major artist who helped design a museum to house his work. The collection has since grown, so the museum got renamed, but the original seventeen paintings (and one mural) are still there on display permanently.

Chagall was born in Russia in a practicing Jewish family, and so both Russian themes and Jewish themes show up in his art. The stories he painted were all from the Jewish Scriptures (the Old Testament), but often he painted his hometown into the background. He also used the idea of Russian Orthodox icons, making sure that Moses or Abraham or David always looked the same in each painting to help identify them.

Chagall seemed to have a complex relationship to Jesus. He often depicted Jesus as crucified somewhere in his work, and the audio commentary said it was to represent the suffering Jew or more generally the suffering of humanity. I can see that, but Jesus was often painted into scenes of moments where God helps people (like the sacrifice of Isaac, or Jacob’s ladder dream). I’m not sure how that all works out for what Chagall meant, but I think there is a lot going on in his work.

His art is very modern, bordering on sketches. He crams his backgrounds with images, sometimes mixing Biblical stories, sometimes cramming in different times in the same work, sometimes adding strange creatures or plants. On the whole, I liked his work very much – I found it thought-provoking and interesting. I’m not sure I would qualify it as “pretty,” but I liked it.

We had lunch at the cafe, sitting outside (yay!). After lunch, Mer and I went back in to the museum to finish a small wing we had missed and to see the film about Chagall’s life. The others left to go to Eze-le-Village, a nearby town where they make perfume. Turns out the Chagall film, which was advertised to be in English, was in French, so we gave up on that pretty quickly.

We went back to the hotel to regroup, then to the train station to buy transit passes for the tram and bus system, so we could catch a bus to Cap d’Ail, a small(ish) town on the way to Monaco. We got off there so that we could walk along an ocean path into Monaco itself. The path had great views of the houses and buildings along the coast, as well as the ocean and the cliffs above the towns. We backtracked a few minutes to go out onto a very small peninsula park which could see toward both Nice and Monaco. The walk was a great way to get into the city.

Monaco is crazy. It is crammed full of buildings and ingenious roads and pedestrian ways that maximize use of space. There are signs of wealth everywhere, from high-end shops to luxury car dealers to advertisements for one-bedroom condos for 3.2 million euros ($3.9 million). We walked up the main hill in Monaco to the palace area. We passed by the palace, but did take in the cathedral, which is modern, but simple and peaceful. There are cute streets and shops around up on the hill, but we were pressed for time, so we took a bus from there to Monte Carlo, the famous casino. We could not get in, as we were not dressed for it, but we did see all the high-end cars parked out front. The cafe with the view of the casino was selling $35 cheeseburgers. We passed.

We then did something almost unheard of for us in Europe. We went to a chain. Starbucks. We needed a bathroom, and so we gave in. I do have to say that the hot chocolate and pastry we bought were excellent, and since it was a rooftop Starbucks, it may have one of the best views of an American chain shop anywhere. After the rest stop, we walked back to the bus stop, where we took a bus that brought us back to Nice along a higher road, so that we could see a different perspective. We passed thought the perfume town, which looked beautiful, and I now hope to get to it tomorrow.

Back in Nice, we went with a safe choice for supper – it was late, and I was not feeling adventurous, so we walked back to our crepe restaurant from two nights ago. Then, it was home to the hotel, where we caught up with the others and heard about their day (and they loved the perfume town, Eze-le-Village). I really did log 13.7 miles walking today, and I am really tired, but I came up all aces for tourism today.

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