Day 5, Nice

We sold two homes last week for $1.8+/1.9m free cash flow. Fun watching 26 months of work start to return on investment. The homes turned out great and more on that shortly.

Let me start by saying I’m no foodie.  Not a connoisseur, not a kitchen person, never worked in a kitchen or restaurant and don’t have a discerning palette.  So this won’t be about ‘the food’, which seems good to a layperson, and pretty recognizable, other than the Brazilian tapioca flour tortillas we had today.  Seems like each civilization has a go-to cheap bread - the naan, the tortilla, american bread, Native American fry bread, the tapioca, etc… Seems like the Far East aren’t big bread eaters, settling in for the grains of rice.

And besides not being a foodie, I’m also only in one city (or several Riviera cities) so my perspective is limited to that of course.  But what there aren’t are convenience stores on every corner selling junk food - chips, candy, licorice, doritos and all the other non-food we consume because it’s shoved in our faces all the time.  There are plenty of fruit markets - small 200 sq ft stores of fruits and vegetables.  Lots of bread and breakfast goods.  Lots of coffee (though by the bag is harder to find than you’d think).

Soda, no problem.  Fast food here in Nice is limited to one Burger King and one McDonalds, both busy.  No Starbucks or dunkin’ - those goods are more local.  Candy, at least the pre-packaged suite of M&M’s and related, harder to find and really, out of sight out of mind.  Or inversely, in sight, in mind.  I mean as a traveling man who puts 35k miles on my cars every year, I need to stop at my fair share of gas stations and convenience stores for coffee and gas and half the time to take a piss, but usually for the latter I’ll detour down a country lane to water a tree.

We are mostly eating in restaurants so I’m sure that comes with the basic issues of restaurant eating - butter, salt, and big portions - but eating at home seems to be a much more unprocessed experience, based on the goods that are easily found and purchased.

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The argument that most of American eats shitty food, is served shitty food, is regulated into a shitty food box is hard to debate.  The over-processed, highly marketed, low nutrition diet is hard to avoid.

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I haven’t seen this much smoking since NYC circa 1999.  A lot of smoking, so much so that I started taking pics of the ashtrays found during our ramblings for a coffee table book I’m going to label “Ashtrays of the Riviera’.  Smoke, flick the butts, vape, etc....

Dogs run off leash - a lot of poop not picked up.

Lots of English on the coast of course, since even the French are self-spiteful enough not to cater to the english-speaking hordes that pass through.  But just inland, like during our 10 miles electronic bike ride this morning, the ability rapidly decreases.  I almost began to think the clichè of French people not speaking English was overblown.   Also, perhaps the niceness, politeness and accommodation is reserved for the coastline as well.

A last thought on the electronic bikes - maybe not all electronic bikes are the same as the lime edition where each pedal is assisted.  That would make more sense, since the bikes we are riding can hardly be termed bikes except for the fact that you are rotating your legs in a bicycle rotation. Even the 3000-5000 ft climb today from sea level to higher Nice elevation was powered by the electric of the beast.  And there’s a job called juicers, and they are in charge - on a contractor basis of course - of recharging the bikes at night and redelivering them to an assigned location.

And I still can’t believe people have remote jobs where they are being monitored by their keystrokes and mouse movements. That is an existence that seems more from the industrial revolution belts of the Ford factory or meat-packing industry than college-educated persons.