Grasse

Saturday morning, we left Genoa early and headed up the highway, which has lots of tunnels through all the mountains here. We stopped in a little town called Taggia to walk around and let off steam, after which Eddie took a long nap in the car. Luckily, he had enough time for a long nap, because of all the times we had to wait in huge lines to pay tolls!
Now we're out of Italy and into France. Our first stop is Grasse, a little town which produces a ton of the world's perfume. This weekend they're having their Jasmine festival. There were so many people and marching bands, and the whole city was rigged with sprayers misting the streets, both cooling it down and scenting it with jasmine. We followed several bands around and Eddie clapped for all the songs. On one cute street, we saw an ice cream shop, but Mama said she only wanted ice cream if they had lavender. Well, this ridiculous challenge was no problem for this glacerie, which had not only lavender but also jasmine and violet!
Eddie enjoyed finding a wall on a piazza with a big waterfall all along it. Then we climbed up to the cathedral-- Eddie still loves visiting churches to dip his hand in holy water-- and on the way, we kept encountering big blue paper ribbons on the road. Eddie would pick them up and carry them for a while. Finally, behind the church, we found their source: a bunch of trees had been festooned with them, near a square with a beautiful overlook of the valley below Grasse. A bunch of kids were running around with them, or jumping in mounds of them, and it was a wonderfully breezy spot to sit down and cool off.

As we were finishing dinner, we heard the thumping beat of a parade approaching in the distance, and set off to find it. Wow! There were all sorts of people dancing and playing music, in strange outfits. Some pretty girls were handing out a big load of flowers, and Eddie got some that he carried the rest of the trip (back to the car, and into the hotel, and back into the car the next day, although by then they had been pretty well dismembered.) Some ballerinas dressed like flowers did a dance around and on a wheelbarrow. Some people on huge stilts came leaping down the steps on the road. Eddie was really impressed by a group with very loud drums, and flashing lit-up costumes-- he says "boom! boom!" a lot now, when he thinks about them.

Eventually it was time to go back to the hotel and bed, clutching our flowers. We're really glad we got to be in Grasse for the festival-it was a lot of fun.