Mas de Bonheur: La Grasse fin de semaine

Faire la grasse matinée is a French expression meaning "to sleep in". It translates literally as "to do the fatty/greasy morning"; however, if you're being a little more generous with your translation of grasse, those extra hours of sleep could instead make that morning "generous", "rich" or "abundant". It's a great expression because you can either feel guilty or rewarded ... you choose!

For us, our so-called grasse fin de semaine, or "long weekend", in Grasse and Nice did not feel at all guilty. (Ok, so I admit it, grasse fin de semaine isn't actually an expression in French -- we just wanted to use it since we went to Grasse.) We, and by we, I mean James, who hasn't really had a break from work for over a year, got to do some much-needed relaxing and sleeping in.

We started off in Nice, where it was surprisingly snowy and alpine.

No, actually, that was a backdrop of fake pine trees sprayed with fake snow at the Nice Christmas market. It was really cold and windy that day, so if we look cold, that's real.

But then it got sunny and instead, Nice looked like this.

Some people thought the sun made it warm enough to swim, but we kept on our winter coats.

Nikaïa was founded around 350 BCE by the same Greeks who founded Marseille. Despite its modern-day status as part of France, from the 7th century until the mid-19th century (although not continuously -- Saracen and Barbarian invaders intervened!) Nice had some strong ties to Italy and was even part of it, which influenced the culture and architectural style of the city today. So you see brightly painted buildings that are reminiscent of the Italian riviera.

This stands in stark contrast to Antibes, just across the bay, which always sided with France (against Nice and Italy). Despite their divergent political views, however, they certainly seemed to share the weather.

You can actually see Nice, way in the background, over my right shoulder, and better in this shot with the crashing waves.

While we're on things Italian: food!

We had a delicious dinner at a vegetarian Italian restaurant called La Zucca Magica, or The Magic Pumpkin. As you can see from the pictures on the website, the Italian owners have a thing for pumpkins. And, in fact, we ate some pumpkin that night.

And James discovered the virtues of Nutella (it's peanut-oil free here ... and, as I've just learned, it now is in the States too -- yippee!) ...

We also took a train ride on the Train des Pignes, a little two-car diesel train that makes four round-trips between Nice and Digne-les-Bains up in the Var valley. The website about the train is in French, but even if you can't read about the history of the line, which has been in service in some form since 1911, it's still worth looking at for the pictures.

The idea for a train along this route was proposed in 1861 (the year after Nice was finally annexed to France) in order to connect Nice to Grenoble by a more direct route; however, it took twenty years before authoriziation for the line was given, and another ten before any of it was built and another twenty before the line was completed. That's 50 years in the making.

Part of the initial delay seems to have been about rail technology. Because the train passes through some extremely mountainous territory and has to make some sharp turns on its 150km route, they had to develop a narrower guage for the rails. Then there was also the building of 25 tunnels, 16 viaducts and 15 metal bridges to get the train from Nice to Dignes-les-Bains. So maybe 50 years isn't that long after all.

The longest tunnel is la Colle-Saint-Michel, which measures 3457m (2.15mi) long and also includes (well almost, it's actually just past the tunnel on the Digne side in Peyresq, which is close to Thorame-Haute on the map) the highest point on the line at 3356ft. The tunnel seems to be totally straight (no curves) because as you go through it, you can look backwards and watch the other opening get more and more dim -- and sort of reddish through the diesel exhaust.

The views were unbelievable -- but as with lots of natural beauty, the photos (taken through a train window with an automatic camera) don't capture all of it. It's really some rough looking country.

Right outside of Nice, it's already dry, rough, cragy mountains. The craziest part is that there are medieval villages perched up on top of the cliffs and when you see them, you really wonder how they could have been built.

Then it gets really cold. For a good portion of the ride, all the trees, bushes, houses, etc. were covered in thick frost. It looked almost like an ice storm. I took one really horrible picture (including glare from the train window), and it turned out so poorly I gave up. You'll have to take my word for it. But look how cold the water looks -- when water looks blue-green like the Var did on this day, you know it's cold. Or that it has a certain mineral content.

Then, the distances between towns get farther, and many of the stops become "optional" -- as in you have to flag down the train. And there's no conductor or operator at these stations, it would just be you. Having been on the train I can say that it's never going that fast, so maybe this isn't an issue. Still, it's not exactly like hailing a taxi.

We took the train most of the way, to St-André-les-Alpes, and got out and walked around a bit and then turned around to take the train back down. There are lots of hiking trails that leave from all the towns up high in the Var valley, and St-André-les-Alpes has a really nice lake, but we'll have to come back for that.

And to ride the train à vapeur, or steam train. On Sundays from mid-May to mid-October, a 1925 steam train makes a short portion of the trip (so if you were coming from Nice, you'd have to take the train we did and then get out and take the steam train and then get back on the other train for the rest of the trip). The train website I linked to there actually belongs to (according to the welcome page) a militant group dedicated to the protection and promotion of the train line. I don't know if the train really needs a militant group defending it anymore, but the association was started in 1975 after there were, apparently, some serious threats to close down the line. They had some cool posters in Provençal though.

Another highlight of our trip (although we have no original photos of it) involved Niçois street food: socca. Socca is made from chickpea flour, water and olive oil (like panisse, but in different quantities, so it has a completely different texture). I don't know what the batter looks like when it's raw, but it gets baked in a hot, hot oven (think pizza) in a gigantic cast iron pan like the one in this photo (originally uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by P. Downey) from Chez René Socca, where we got ours.

Chez René is really just an open kitchen that makes socca, pissaladière and a couple of other pizzas, spicy conch fritters, vegetable fritters, french fries and fried sardines. Here's a picture of it, originally uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by P. Semeria. I have no idea when this photo was taken, but it was not 2005 because the prices on the board are clearly in Francs -- a portion of socca was only 2€ (not 10) and our whole dinner including pissaladière and conch fritters was only 7€.

I walked by Chez René a few different times and I never saw it without a line about twenty-deep. It always filed around the corner. You can get your food to go (in which case they wrap it up in paper for you), or to take across the alley to the tables and benches that comprise the restaurant (in which case they pile it on a paper plate, as in this photo originally uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by P. Techamuamvivit).

Now, I thought we'd be able to try socca when we got to Marseille, but no dice. And when we finally got the socca and the rest of our food, it was hot and delicious looking, and we were hungry, and we'd been waiting since mid-September to try it so we dove in before we remembered to take photos. Sorry. But at least none of these photos involves our weird black plates. You should all be happy we were on vacation.

Here's a picture of the Place Massena at night. Those white arcs are part of the holiday lighting, but the sitting/kneeling humanoids on top of the poles are always there. They change colors if you watch them long enough.

After Nice, we went on to Grasse: the center of French perfume-making since the late 1700s! However, its fame as a town of flowers has a more complicated origin. Back in the Middle Ages, Grasse was famous for its tanneries, which are well known to be a stinky (and back in the day, dangerous) business. According to the tour we went on at Fragonard (named for Grasse's native son, the famous painter J-H Fragonard), it was because the nobility demanded less stinky leather goods, especially gloves, that the perfumeries started to take off -- they could perfume the leather.

And so Grasse, with its very special microclimate that allowed it to grow hundreds of tons (and yes, I really mean hundreds of thousands of pounds) of jasmine and other precious flowers every year became known for its perfumes rather than its stinky leather. Just think of how many flowers it would take to make a ton. The tour guide said a jasmine-picker can harvest 3-5 pounds a day and it takes tons and tons of flowers to yield enough essence to make a perfume.

We also learned about fragrance extraction over the years. Enfleurage was a common technique developed in the early days of the Grasse perfume industry because it allowed the perfumers to extract the volatile compounds from flowers, which would be damaged or destroyed by methods that involved heat, like distillation. So, the essences of flowers like jasmine and tuberose were captured by placing them "face" down into some beef tallow that had been slathered on a metal screen. There are new techniques now.

And at the Musée International de la Parfumerie not only did we learn more about the creation of perfumes, but also about the history of perfumes (and cosmetics, which were often perfumed) since the times of the Egyptians. It was absolutely fascinating. If I knew in 1992 what I know now, I would have paid more attention in organic chemistry and then gone to school to become un nez, literally "a nose", or perfumer. After three years of formal training, you do 5-7 years internship. To become a master perfumer, well that takes some skill, but still. Linguistics, schminguistics I say.

Here's a panorama from the B&B we stayed in which was up on the hillside overlooking Grasse. That bay you see in the center-right of the collage is Cannes.

The B&B is only a few years old, but apparently it's on property that was formerly part of the gardens of Austrian baroness Alice de Rothschild. She spent a lot of time in Grasse at the family chateau and planted gardens over a huge portion of the hillside. The current owners are very apologetic that their gardens are not as pristine as in the days of the baroness, but it's still a really beautiful garden with citron trees ...

irises...

other exotic plants...

and a secret passageway that the baroness liked to use to leave the gardens and walk into the town of Grasse. I feel like a baroness in this shot (Elsa Schräder, of course, not Alice de Rothschild).

We walked around the very picturesque town dodging surly youths with too much time on their hands over the winter break, toured the perfume factories and did our best to avoid peanut oil, which seems to be ubiquitous in Grasse.

We had a quiet new year's eve in our B&B with a crémant (it wasn't from the Champagne AOC) ...