Letter from Nice

Hotel Plaisance
20, rue de Paris
Nice

Here, downtown in old Nice, my hotel room has a little balcony overlooking the narrow streets, not far from the Cote D Azur.

As fate determines, I am staying next door to where my son-in-law Loic first lived when he arrived here for his middle school and high school years, at 22, rue de Paris.

Driving here, we skirted the shoreline, passing along the Promenade d Anglais, the section where the English come to escape their bitter winters. Now, of course, it is summer – hot, steamy, string bikini weather for many more visitors than just the English.

Yet, flying in here as I did on British Midlands Airways, many of my planemates were British, and I enjoyed overhearing their conversations, especially the excited young people. My immediate seatmates, however, were an Asian couple, who, I decided, were certainly either Korean or Japanese.

One of the benefits of dating a Japanese woman is learning certain distinguishing characteristics among the various East Asian peoples. (Without boring you with the details, I’ll just wager I was right, at least about the woman. The man, actually, could have been Filipino, Thai, or even Indonesian. He was most certainly financially successful.)

There was a surprisingly large number of Asians on both of my flights the past twenty four hours. There also were an assortment of Europeans, including French, Germans, British, and Hassidic Jews, several Arabs, a Persian family, Indians, including Sikhs (I wonder if they still are allowed to carry their knives?), and a South African couple who run a Christian camp ground north of Capetown.

They sat next to me from San Francisco to London, and explained that they had just spent six weeks in the States visiting various Christian camps in the Midwest as well as in California.

Jews, Christians, Moslems – will they ever get along?

There were precious few African-Americans on the jumbo jet flying over Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Scotland, and finally the green fields of England. And not a single African or South American. For that matter, I did not detect the presence of any Russians, Central Asians, people from the Balkans or any Latinos at all.

It struck me, as we traversed a third or so of the globe, that only certain people move in the bubble of international travel. Because I have done it so many times, all over the world, this essential truth sometimes eludes me, but today I was reminded that perhaps five percent of the global population even qualifies as potential world travelers, which might give new meaning to the “mile high club” mythology.


My friend claims that flying makes you hungry and horny. I don’t know about the latter but I ate around four meals as I moved from the west coast of the U.S. to Nice.


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Tonight, the wind dropped, and we ate outside. Loic's mom served a fabulous meal, details of wwhich I'll file tomorrow...

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