Everybody's talkin' at me

11am
We've been stopped under a Pyrenee for a while now. I'm pretty sure this isn't the border crossing, so I'm not sure why the delay.... Okay, we're moving again. There are no Spanish people on this train; everyone's either American or French. I've alienated them all with my hacking. I feel like Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, and Shane is Jon Voight. It's just a cold, really, but it sounds awful. Good thing the SARS scare is over, or I might have ended up in quarantine or something.

And. Why can people not read their train tickets and get in the right seat? It's not that difficult. Really.

4pm
The first thing you see when you walk out of the train station in Montpellier is a McDonald's; I'm not sure if I think that's funny or sad. We were planning to stay tonight in Montpellier, for no particular reason except that it's on the way and there was a direct train from Barcelona and this Canadian girl I met in a hostel said something about it, but then the guidebook got me all excited about Nice so we decided to keep going. The guy at the train station ticket counter was the nicest French person ever, super helpful and patient with our bad French. So our main activity in Montpellier was buying a ticket on the next train out. We also walked through a little park and bought sandwiches. France is pretty uneventful so far. We don't have a place to stay in Nice and can't make reservations because for some reason my phone won't call France. Hopefully we won't end up on the streets or, more likely, crammed into the laundry room or attic of some crappy hostel.

Guys in military fatigues carrying giant guns and wearing berets pace around the train stations here in France. They're in the airports, too. You can make all kinds of jokes about the French army, but in person they're pretty intimidating.

12am
I fell in love with Nice before I really met it. Always a bad idea. It has all these art museums that sound great, and it even has a Russian Orthodox church. I was really excited for Nice, but then we got here and it's all tourists, construction, neon, and internet places. The beach is nice, and we found a hotel and had a good dinner, but so far I liked Nice better before I got here. On another note, nothing makes me feel better about my Spanish skills than trying to speak a language I really don't speak. Like French.