Hey guys, thanks for the comments. Travelling alone gets lonely at times and i think I must have been when i went off on that rant, but no matter. The past day or so has been pretty fun. I think we left off two nights ago.
People tend to stay in the hostel during the night as it's far removed from town and the local bars and things tend to be either completely french speaking or filled with sketchball Frenchmen trying to pick up/take advantage of girls. So we hung out in the hostel and I met a variety of interesting people. My first "friend" was an American who went to UNC who was pretty quiet but had done a fair amount of travelling. He later bounced to pick up his laundry so I moved over towards a group of Australians and one Canadian talking politics. I hung out with them for a while until we were told to go inside. After 10 pm here at the hostel the neighbors apparently complain at the drop of a pin so all the noise is restricted to the "chapel." There are big debates as to whether or not it's horribly sacreligious to basically party in a place called the chapel but people are ultimately not that concerned.
Anyway, the highlight personality was this Irish guy who hadn't paid for a room for two weeks and was just crashing, sleeping head to toe with a friend of his. I can only imagine what it's like for Danny, in a country of Irish characters.
The next morning I woke up early to head back to Vence to go to mass. I ended waiting an inordinate amount of time for a bus to the bus station and missed the mass (they had locked the door). I was pretty bummed because I had missed this potentially awesome thing and because i had taken a basically entirely unneccesary hour long bus ride. So I wondered Vence for a little before heading to the Maeght Foundation, which was really cool. I pulled a "dad" and took tons of pictures even though I think you were supposed buy a permit in order to do so.
On the way back to the hostel, I nearly ran into my first serious trouble. For some reason, when i switched over to the local bus from the bus that took me back from Vence, my day pass wasn't accepted and I couldn't discern why not. I didn't even try to get the french speaking driver to explain it to me. For the rest of the story it's important to know how the bus system works here. Basically you buy a ticket and you have it validated in a little machine in the bus. However, it's all almost entirely on the honor system. Supposedly people check randomly but in all the time i spent riding buses last year and this year so far they haven't been checked. Back to the story...
I was very tempted to leave things to chance and just stay on the train but I decided not to risk it and bought an "un voyage" pass. At the next stop a whole bunch of officially dressed men came in intimidatingly and chekced everyone's tickets... phew.
The rest of the day was mostly "managerial"- laundry and showering and stuff and I took a breif nap as well.
Last night I hung out with these two American girls who had just graduated from college. They're going to be in Venice when we will be so we might try to meet up. It's tough though to plan something like that when you nothing about the city and there are no cell phones or, phones at all really.
It's raining today for the first time since I've been here, but I'm gonn try and check out Eze and Monacco before boarding up to head to Florence tonight. Can't wait to meet up with Rob and David and later Danny, have fun in Lmont and Mamurdaneck,
Charlie