This morning is off to a rough start, as I just had it out with the front desk attendant. It has been two days now since I checked into my hotel and no one has come by to resolve the issue of the water by the front door of my room. Of course, I know why there is water on the floor…..because the shower is so damn small that every time I attempt to turn around I get goosed by the faucet handle (I am going to start taking showers here three times a day)! All kidding aside, there is nowhere for the water to go but OUT of the shower when I am in the shower, because the shower stall is that small. I want to cover my ass though and make sure they know the problem is not me, that there was water on the floor when I checked in and I have been diligently checking progress several times a day on when they are going to resolve the problem.
Insert new guy at the front desk this morning, who again didn’t understand what I was saying about water on the floor, so he came upstairs and felt the carpet and told me it was dry. Yes, I realize it is dry, because I have been sleeping with the window open for the last two days to air out the stank ass mildew smell and dry the room out a bit. And THEN, he went into a lecture about how to properly take a shower in the teeny-weeny shower stall. So, I got all French on his ass and told him I knew how to take a shower unlike most Frenchmen who wouldn’t know what to do with a bar of soap and bucket of water if you held a gun to their head and said “bathe bitch!” Then, I said I was very unhappy with his treatment, threw my hands up and stormed out of the hotel for my ritual church tour.
It must be a-hole Frenchmen day because while at the Notre Dame de l’Assomption (150-year-old Basilique in Nice, yep every town has one), this poor woman was walking around viewing the Stations of the Cross and she tripped and fell into a pew. And what did her husband do? NOTHING! He just stood there while she slowly got up off the floor to collect her things and sat down while she waited for the embarrassment to pass – and the whole time he just stood there like a doofus. I write this all while I am IN the church (someone smite me!). Suffice to say there will be no crying for me in a church today, I better go walk off this bad attitude. So, I headed up another ginormous hill to see some ancient Greco-Roman ruins (awesome), the Matisse Museum and the Montesarry de Cimiez.
I was impressed with the variety of work displayed from Matisse – I had no idea his style had varied so widely from paintings similar to Monet in the late 1800s to more abstract cubism and sculpture in the 1920s-40s, then it all changed in the 50s, after he had surgery performed due to complications from duodenal cancer, when he became influenced by artwork brought home by preschoolers – it was a lot of cut and paste crap that I just didn’t get, but he loved the ocean so I will forgive him for his I have to be an oddball artist phase of papier-mâché all over the walls of his house (his poor wife). I did stop at his grave, located in the Monetary nearby, to pay my respects and apologize for being such a twit and went onto explain how my attitude from the morning was plaguing my day – I think he forgave me because as I was leaving the park, I saw a woman playing with her dog and I felt the little black cloud lift. She was blowing bubbles and he would jump up and catch each one until they were gone and then stand there wagging his tail until she did it again – hilarious! (I do object to the apparent dog-racism that the French have displayed in their parks, though – why is it that dogs aren’t allowed to crap in the park, but the pigeons can desecrate the whole place?!)
The day got even better when I stopped to get a beignet on the way back to my hotel – how can you not be cheered up by fried sweet dough rolled in sugar?! And I also saw a little blue car reminiscent of the one my grandfather let me play with as a kid…..they might be the same size too.
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