Heritage Day

I would first like to apologize for the tiny number of pictures - photography was prohibited in practically all museums. The few photos that I did manage to take are appended to the "First Days" Picasa album.

On Friday, we got a chance to sit in on a rehearsal of "Rock n' Roll" by Tom Stoppard at the National Theater of Nice. The opening is scheduled for next Friday, but nothing was ready yet. The angry director yelled at the actors, at the musicians, at the sound engineer, and at the lighting engineer with few pauses in between. Stage transitions didn't work properly; one time, a huge bookshelf nearly fell on top of the director as it was being dragged onstage because the control room engineer forgot to raise one of the side curtains. When the support band came on, the lead guitarist realized that he had no sound and yelled to the sound engineer - only to find that the sound engineer has mysteriously disappeared from the mixing desk. The furious director sent a few people out to find him. After five minutes or so the engineer suddenly appeared in the hallway, peacefully strolling towards his working place while hugging a random girl and whispering something in her ear. He didn't realize how much he's been missed until a stream of curses from the director snapped him back into reality and made him sprint to the mixing board, flip a couple of switches, and plug the lead guitar into the PA. This made me remember the "ok, take a nap... and zen FIRE ZE MISSILES!" Anyways, we'll see this production sometime in October, I'm really wondering how they're going to pull it off...

This past weekend, France celebrated Heritage Day (well, actually, two days). What this essentially means is that all museums are open to the public free of charge. By far the coolest one was the musée Masséna, located in a beautiful oceanfront mansion that used to belong to Masséna himself. This guy was one of Napoleon's marshals, and the mansion was in fact a personal gift from Napoleon. Items on display involved a jacket that Napoleon wore on Elba (that I was able to smuggle a picture of), Josephine's wedding dress, and tons of historical artefacts from Nice. I found the building we're living in on plans dating back to the 19th century =)

Now, two weeks into the trip, some tensions are already beginning to appear within our little group... My roommates have decided that they don't like two other girls, Sara and Dora, and so I guess they're no longer welcome in the apartment. Which is a shame, because Sara's a great cook and Dora has many interesting stories to tell, having lived in Hungary and travelled all over Europe... New people and new friends are appearing, though, but so far most of them are other foreign students - Germans, Swedes, Belgians, Austrians, etc. I'm hoping that eventually we'll get some real French people in the group, too!