My Sunday (yesterday) was spent on an island off the coast of France with three friends going to school here in Nice. They're tourism majors (yes that's a major here) from all over France and are just fun in general. If nothing else they push my French like crazy. In fact, most of the French slang I know (if not all of it) can be attributed to these lovely ladies.
Charlie's Frogs
St Marguerite is an island right off the coast of Cannes (famous for its film festival) and is home to a huge star fort and thick forests. The fort was once used as the state prison, and was home to many including the famed man in the iron mask who stayed there for 11 years. We had to take a ferry to get there, and as you can see it had a sweet French flag on the back.
Of course I thought to myself, this would be a perfect picture to BE in! I just need to get over there and get one of the girls to take my picture as I look very French next to the flying colors. So I handed my camera off, got over there, and what happens? The stupid flag stops moving! The wind died literally as I sat down and didn't start up again until the boat was moving... I was upset at the flag...
We started with lunch on a closed dock, but were rudely interrupted by a seagull that had the guts to walk right up and snag some lunch meat from Audrie. This resulted in much screaming (from the girls) and plenty of laughter (from me). It turned into quite the debacle as the seagull stood just out of bottle's reach and would occasionally try to waddle back into theft-range.
Eventually other gulls in the watter began calling out and we were soon surrounded by a number of them. Since I hate seagulls I thought it would be funny to get their hopes up with orange rind only to watch them spit it out in disgust. As I hooked a piece or two over my head and into the water the girls watched (Melanie scolded me) as the seagulls fought over worthless scraps. It was in this moment that Gimpgull made his move, using the commotion as cover he dove in for a piece of bread, which startled all of us, terrified Audrie, and left us laughing for a while as we marveled at the bird's cunning.
Turned out he couldn't fly, thus "Gimpgull," we felt bad for him as we left and he tried to make it to our crumbs before the other birds pushed him away. The rest of the trip was far less depressing though as the fort was a-mazing.
The village on top was cool too, it looked like it was straight out of a movie scene.
We went from there on an 8km loop around the edge of the island, stopping every twenty feet in wonder over some newly discovered view. I took over 400 photos in the four hours we were there (and had to somehow choose 120 of them to post on Facebook). Remember you can see full sized versions if you click on them here.
If you want to see more photos you can click on the links on the right-hand side of the page. And for those of you waiting for The Saga of the Beard episode 2, it's ready to be posted, I just need to feel the need =)
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