Monday, August 16, 2010

Italy 3/France 4 - Prada in Milan, the Beach in Nice!










This is just a quickie. The Princess is loving reliving her trip through this blog - so duty calls and these few days must be recorded!!

Our time with HOS was drawing to a close. Dinner at Matteo's was our last dinner together, the next evening HOS was heading back to Sydney, flying out of Milan, and The Princess and I were driving the car to Nice, France, to drop the car off - and to spend a couple of nights on the French Riviera!!

Sooooooooooooo...what to do with our last day in Italy...Milan of course! We drove into to the fashion capital of Italy to show The Princess the amazing Duomo di Milano, the Milan Cathedral (first pic), it is a truly impressive Cathedral, it takes your breath away.

Of course the magical Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, which is a huge glass-topped shopping arcade linking the squares of Duomo and La Scala, can take away your breath even more if you are a Prada or Gucci devotee! The Prada store here, which you can see in the second pic, is the original Prada store, the first Prada store ever! It has an incredible basement area that's like a fashionista's Aladdin's cave! Truly beautiful marble checkerboard floor covered by tourists buying Prada, Prada, Prada!!

The Galleria is also home to a Gucci store, and their Gucci Cafe, which is really a totally overpriced tosser's cafe....but when in Milan....!!! Of course we did! There's The Princess there in pic 3 enjoying life in the food world of Gucci - and guess what? The portions were tiny, and extremely expensive! Hmmmmm!!!

But we had a great time and The Princess was in awe of the place - it really is spectacular.

There was a sad part to the day, where I had to bid farewell to my man. I won't bore you with the details...we said goodbye and he watched me drive away in our little Golf, with our maps, The Princess at the ready as co-pilot, and within 3 hours we were in Nice. Nice.

Nice was perhaps not so nice after all! Our first impressions, that night when we went out to "cruise", we decided it was feral and we were going to have to lock ourselves in our hotel room till our plan left! It was just awful...drunk French, Italian, and English yobs everywhere, grossssss. We were in bed by midnight I think.

The next day dawned beautifully and lo and behold, the world outside seemed nicer, pretty even. We went down to check out the beach and discovered all these private little club type things - they had sun lounges, umbrellas, towels, and even jacuzzis to rent! They all had bars and restaurants...it was like the Italian Lido, but on the Mediterannean. COOL. It took us a while, but we finally found one that had a spot for us (it was the weekend) - so we settled in for the afternnon - we rented lounges, towels and sun umbrellas, and drank cocktails and ate fries! I swam a lot, but I've got to tell you those French pebble beaches are just killers on the feet - even in the water! But a magic afternoon was had by both The Princess and I, we felt truly fabulous and oh-so-cool!!! There are some pics there of the views from our lounges, the water, the view from the Promenade des Anglais overlooking our "Plage Miami" private resort!

We dined that night at another of these little mini-resorts! A few "resorts" up is Hi Beach, which was way cooler than "Plage Florida" and has a super organicy Japanese type restaurant. I was a bit dubious at first, I must admit, but the food was FAB!!! OH MY GOSH - the best Nicoise Salad I've ever eaten (pictured above) - you can also see the evening view of this little place and The Princess getting ready to dine. I have to mention that for dessert we chose to try a tub each of the local gourmet icecream, a brand called Alparel. Bloody hell, it was AWESOME! I had the Poire William (William Pear), and it was pure pear fruit in a sorbet, such intensity of flavour, The Princess chose the more decadent Salted Caramel, which she found a bit too wacky...though I thought it was close to perfection!

So, a wonderful couple of days were had by the bathing beauties...now heading to London with their golden tans and appetite for scones...lots and lots of scones!!!

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