Two weeks on the road during the Syria trip with not enough sleep took the toll on me. I spent 3 weeks in Bulgaria recovering and getting ready for my next destination, Algeria. It was possible to fly from Bulgaria to Algiers on one ticket but this meant a long journey and sleepless nights again. I decided to take it easy and to do it in 2 stages. First, I would go to Nice and see the city, perhaps travel around it. I had not been to this part of France before. The second stage would be a short direct flight from Nice to Algiers. That way, I would not be exhausted when I arrived in Algeria.
The plan worked marvelously. Rather than staying at a hotel, I rented a studio apartment in Nice. It was tiny, however the owner somehow fitted into it everything that one would want for comfortable living from a king-size bed to a washing machine tucked into a window niche. The apartment had a kitchenette with all necessary appliances and a desk to do my freelance job in the evening after I was done with sightseeing.
Without any specifics what to see in Nice, I wandered during the day in the old Nice, along the Promenade des Anglais and in the port, sitting down for a coffee or a meal when I felt tired.
On the way back to old Nice, I stumbled upon an old Israelite Cemetery where statues and tombs look like the belong to a museum.
Another large community in Nice is Russian. it was fashionable for Russian nobility to spend months in Paris and on the French Riviera in the 19th century. Tsar Nicholas II built the St Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral in Nice to commemorate his son who died there. The Cathedral was open in 1912. It is the largest Eastern Orthodox cathedral in Western Europe. An interesting fact about it is that the Cathedral and the parcel of land on which it stands are the property of the Russian state.
About 30,000 Russian speakers live on the French Riviera today. They are descendants of the Russian aristocrats who fled the country after the Revolution of 1917 plus modern-day immigrants. While in Nice, I heard Russian speech on its streets all the time.