Nice by night

 The thing about being here is that you never forget how peaceful your hometown is. And yet you might even like it.

 To the left is what Avenue Jean Medecin looked like this evening at 8. Bomb alert. Fantastic. But I'm not here to talk about this - yet.

So the second weekend since I had arrived was pretty eventful. Even though it all happened more than 20 days ago, I think it's worth a recap. I knew even before coming here that this wasn't the safest place in France. People had warned me that car stealing is commonplace, getting robbed even more frequent and stuff like that. Luckily, there was always somebody saying that it wasn't all that bad, you just had to deal with it like in any other European city.  Some poster on a newsgroup even went as far as saying that this is the only place where when you arrive by car street signs tell you that you should close the car windows and lock the doors. Now, I came by car but I didn't see any of that. Also, I spent one month in Paris taking a French course (more on that later - maybe) and I never felt unsafe in the city centre, even very late at night. I might have been lucky, I don't know.

Back to my story, it was a Friday night at around 2AM when a few (say 7-8) friends and I were walking across Place Massena, the main square in Nice. All of a sudden we saw two men from north africa going toward us, one of them aiming at one of the girls. So what did he do? He grabbed the girl's hair just because he felt like it and then, when some other people in the group weren't too happy about it, he tried to look as if it was all just a misunderstanding, saying he didn't do anything wrong.

While being backed up by another man, often times their strategy is this:

1. Provoke somebody to start a fight
2. Say your intentions were good, you always meant well
3. See how the chosen victims react. If they get mad, all the more reason to do the same and start threatening them little by little or even escalate. If not, do something stupid to piss them off and then go back to step 2 until you've actually managed to have a fight with someone and possibly rob them or else you give up and go away, looking for your next victim (step 1)

Indeed what happened was that these two guys began to yell at us that they had knives in their pockets, that we should behave ourselves and that they felt insulted,  until I briefly apologized for everything so we could leave.

The following night we were  all pregaming on the beach, and when I say "all" I mean some 30-40 people. Some sitting in a circle, some standing up. There are always some iffy people intermittently sneaking around, trying to steal people's belongings, but you sort of know that already when you're there. If not the first time, the second one. But this once two men came around (it's always two, yeah) and put all their efforts into bothering two of the girls who were sitting next to us by making stupid remarks, in a desperate attempt to be as annoying as possible. So you're already aware that in this case all you can do is stand up and leave, and that's what everybody did. Not at all happy with this, one of the two men, while keeping a big smile on his face, took the ukulele from a student, and decided it was about time he self taught himself how to play it.  So he went on like this for like twenty minutes, after which he must have thought that it was not his path in life, so he left.

Good lord.

The morning after that I read on facebook that one of the guys we had run into the previous night had been attacked, but he was lucky enough to be able to stand up and run into the closest club to seek shelter.

Now, that wasn't the warmest welcome this city could give me. I must say, though, nothing else that I know of happened after that. And I hope it won't! (see bomb alert above... I actually wrote this post last night. I shouldn't make any other predictions, right?)