Nice trip report, featuring Ligurians, pyramid hunts and an impromptu shul crawl

[lethargic_man]

In case anyone was wondering if I've dropped off LJ, I'm now back, from having gone to Nice for a cousin's wedding, then—after just long enough a gap I couldn't roll them into one big holiday—Amsterdam for ploni_bat_ploni's wedding.

Neither my cousin nor his bride lived in Nice; they just wanted to get married there. The term, I am told, for this kind of thing is "stag-flation". (Do I need to explain the joke in that?) Here's a piccy of me at the wedding.

As flying is the worst thing most westerners do to the environment, and I take environmentalism seriously, I went down by train—Eurostar to Paris, then TGV to Nice. I was expecting the trains to be a damn sight better in France than in the UK, and indeed they were: no interminable waiting whilst stationary in the middle of nowhere, reasonably prompt arrivals and departures, and, at TGV speeds, a travel time of just three hours between Paris and the south coast. The flip side of that coin was that neither the Eurostar nor the TGV had power sockets, so once coronium's battery died, that was it^*, and I had to deal with extremely unhelpful ticket sellers trying to get an RER ticket to get across Paris.

* Though it must be said the Eurostar train I went on the following week to Brussels (en route to Amsterdam) did have power sockets.

Nice is located in the Alpes Maritimes; the foothills of the Alps come right down to the Mediterranean^*, and there are picturesque little villages perchée on clifftops up in the hills. My parents and I went driving around some of them; in one of which I encountered working water pumps for the first time in my life.

* Linguistic aside: I hadn't realised until I asked what it meant that ים התיכון means almost the same as does the English name: "Interior Sea". (It's the same root as in בתוך.)

We also went searching for a pyramid just outside Nice thought to have been constructed by Roman soldiers from Egypt. Despite forgetting to take with the printout of the website saying where it was, we managed—after much searching—to get to the closest place you could get to it by road. We asked how long it would take to walk to, and were told an hour. As we had not expected anything like this, my parents were all for crying off, as this was at the end of the afternoon, but I managed to persuade my mother to give my father and I half an hour (later extended a bit) to look. I went barrelling up the hill out of the built-up area, and, seeing the land rise to a summit ahead, charged up it at a ridiculous rate in the hot sun, expecting the pyramid would be at the top. Turns out it wasn't, and the top turned out anyway to be a long ridge with a path on either side, so we never did get to see the pyramid, but I had fun looking.

After having walked around Nice and looked at the sites, I went to the Archaeological Musem, at the site of the Roman settlement of Cemenelum, a mile or two inland from the original Greek colony of Nikaia. And of course, I was never happier in Nice than when surrounded by Roman ruins, Greek vases, imported Etruscan pottery, and even some little figurines by the Ligurians, the first recorded inhabitants of the land. There was nothing there quite as cool as the Roman Swiss Army knife livredor and I saw I forget where, but there were some quite cool (and rather scary) bronze masks of Silenus, originally attached to amphorae.

Nice has a community of 30,000 Jews. On Shabbos morning, I went to the main Orthodox shul, to discover only my father there of the wedding party. I didn't stay long—the service was doing nothing for me. It was Sephardi, and after my shul-hopping in Paris, I was pretty much Sephardied out; moreoever the decorum was bad, and in my first quarter of an hour I had twice got turfed out of my seat by old men wanting their seat back. So I upped and left and headed to the Masorti shul, dragging my rather less motivated father along with me. The Masorti shul was twenty minutes walk away, on Rue Shakespeare; but since the Orthodox service had started very much earlier, we arrived earlier in the service than we had left.

There were about twenty-five people in the Masorti service, though the room could hold a lot more. I presume a lot of people were away on their summer holidays. (Apparently in France everyone does this at the same time.) The building itself was less than a year old, and decorated in pine that made it look like the furnishings had come from IKEA. Most of the service was taken by a man in his thirties (the rabbi?), who seemed (from what we saw) to be the main force behind the community; he also gave the sermon, and gave a little דְרָשָׁה after each of the עַלִיוֹת, which sounded like it would have been quite interesting had I understood all of it, but made the service drag out very long. (It also resonated for me, even though he referred to Talmudic and mediaeval rabbis in it, with the custom of explaining each reading in the vernacular, as instituted 2500 years ago by Ezra and Nehemiah.)

The davening here was mostly Ashkenazi (the siddur they were using had a slip inserted giving the Sephardi version of the קְדוּשָׁה, but the first paragraph of it (כֶּתֶר) was the only part they used; for the rest they followed the Ashkenazi nusach), and they used some of the same tunes as Assif, so I could join in, which I couldn't in the other shul.

The service was non-segregated, but also largely non-egalitarian; the only participation I saw by women was for גְלִילָה, and the rabbi's little daughters sang שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל at the start of the Torah service, and also a piyut (I forget which) at the end of the service. Apart from the rabbi's children, there was only one person there below forty, but maybe everyone else was away on holiday. Some of the women wore capels, and there was one old woman who had evidently forgotten hers, and had a folded paper napkin on her head instead.

Comments

Observations on Nice

[bluepork.livejournal.com]

First, you may be amused to hear that the ortho shul in Nottingham is also on Shakespeare street!

Your reference to stagflation is vaguely amusing... but I wonder if you understand what the term was originally coined to refer to, or who invented it? This brings back painful memories of A-level and university economics!

Can you explain the word "Keter" in the context of sephardi kaddusha please?

Re: Observations on Nice

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Your reference to stagflation is vaguely amusing... but I wonder if you understand what the term was originally coined to refer to, or who invented it?

AIUI the term refers to a stagnant economy combined with high inflation, such as happened in the 1970s. I don't know who coined it.

Can you explain the word "Keter" in the context of sephardi kaddusha please?

In place of נַקְדִּישְׁךָ they say <googles>:

כֶּתֶר יִתְּנוּ לְךָ ה׳ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מַלְאָכִים הֲמוֹנֵי מַעְלָה עִם עַמְּךָ יִשרָאֵל קְבוּצֵי מַטָּה׃ יַחַד כֻּלָּם קְדֻשָּׁה לְךָ יְשַׁלֵּשׁוּ כַּדָּבָר הָאָמוּר עַל יַד נְבִיאֶךָ וְקָרָא זֶה אֶל זֶה וְאָמַר׃