Having spent last week in Nice it was interesting to see that the Tour de France was generally overlooked. I didn't go out of my way to find a bar to watch the race in, and couldn't have watched for long at €8 a beer, but you wouldn't have known the race was on!
Maybe it's down to the manifold distractions of a city by the sea, or that a french rider wasn't going to win again or the fact that, in this tourist honeypot, sport seems to be unimportant (the same could have been said at a trip to the Monaco GP about 10 years ago when we had to ask the owner of a empty bar to put the qualifying session on the tv for us).
What was great though was to see how Nice has re-imagined itself. A tram system has been put in through the heart of the city and, last week, a fleet of 900 hire bikes was launched to complement it. The Vélo Bleu bikes take their name and colour from Nice's famous and distinctive blue seats that line the Promenade des Anglais; the two initiatives together have taken a crowded, dirty, stressed and car centric city and given it back to the people.
Steve
Saturday night, Place Massena
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