Last Day On The French Riviera

This morning we had a business presentation with a local university in Nice, EDHEC. EDHEC is a French business school that is located on the street across from the beach. We learned yesterday that it is currently one of the top 5 business school programs in France. The presentation was rather long though, and I was having to fight my body from going to sleep. I was on the front row though, so I made myself pay very close attention. I’ve discovered the easiest and best way to stay awake during boring presentations is just to simply take a TON of notes. Afterwards, since I am a part of the Nice/Monaco presentation team, we took a picture with our speakers and presented them with certificates and a very nice pen in recognition of them taking time out of their day to speak to our group.

The meeting with the business school didn’t take up too much of our time though, which was fortunate because this was our last day in Nice. Jay, Taylor, Kinsey, Caitlin, CJ, and I changed and went to go try this restaurant on the beach, Lido Plage, that was recommended by kids who went on last year’s trip. The food was good, but not marvelous. I think I’ve had better on this trip so far. The view, however, was unparalleled. We were practically one of the only groups of customers in the restaurant because of the cloudy weather and had the sound of the ocean waves rolling up on the rocks to relax us during our lunch.

We attempted to lay out on the beach after lunch, but the clouds soon turned into a steady sprinkle and then into rain. We went back inside, showered, and just hung out in our rooms for about 3 hours. As luck would have it, as soon as I got out of the shower and was all cleaned up from the beach, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Go figure! The same group of us, except Laura came instead of CJ, set off for dinner in Old Town Nice. We decided on the Buffalo Grill (again, so typical us. Everyone wants to find the most American food possible, and it never is as good as home). The food was sub-par honestly. My grilled chicken breast lacked flavor was really tough. It probably didn’t help my appetite that I had just had a scoop of dark chocolate gelato from Julian’s snack stand right before we walked to dinner though, haha. While we’re sitting in the restaurant it starts pouring again, so we wait to leave until it stops (though apparently that’s rude to do over here, because the waitress told us to get up and leave before we had even finished our last drinks after our meal because she had customers waiting—well, no tip for her).


Some people wanted to walk around and find a pub or a bar to go drink in, so I followed the group. Honestly though, drinks are SO EXPENSIVE over here and I would much rather just spend my money on souvenirs for myself and people back home that I love. At least wine is cheap-ish, because that’s all I’m really interested in drinking anyways. Sometimes though, a beer can be around 7 Euros. That’s nearly $11 in American money! Waste of money! Well anyways, apparently there was some big soccer game going on tonight that had all the bars and pubs packed. Since it had started raining on us AGAIN, we just decided to head back to the hotel. I repacked my bag for our departure in the morning for Austria. Tomorrow we have the longest coach travel day of the trip… somewhere between 10-11 hours before we get to Innsbruck. That is a lot of time to sleep and be bored!