Grasse

My time in France is really running out…fast.

This is my last weekend in Nice with my host family. I have 2 more weekends left, but I’m going to be in Frankfurt for this one (Wednesday-Sunday), and my host mom will be out of town for my last weekend here. So she proposed that we spent the day together.

All week, she’s been asking me what I wanted to see or do that I hadn’t done yet. It was a tough question, and we finally decided on the Rose Festival in Grasse, a town world-famous for perfume. Actually Grasse is ruined for me, since I recently read Le Parfum, a horribly disturbing novel about a disgusting guy who tracks down virgins and murders them for their scent. It’s set in Grasse and now that’s always the first thing I think of. 

Movie adaptation of the book- Grenouille (main character), mid-kill

I actually went there with the Maryland group really soon after we got here in February. We all got a tour of a perfume factory and walked around. It’s a tiny sleepy town built up on a steep slope, almost a cliff. It’s rocky and has tons of wildflowers growing out of all the nooks, crannies and crevices.

Today the city was bustling with tents and vendors selling all kinds of crafts. There were also tons of rose beds, each with a sign posted to tell you what kind of roses were in each plot. I’ve always kind of imagined that all roses smell the same, but today I realized that there is a really wide array of “rose” scents. They all smelled completely different from each other, but at the same time all smelled like “rose.”

After the roses, we stopped at a café and were either fortunate or unfortunate enough to end up at an outside table where a belly dancing snake charmer was setting up shop. It’s tough to have fake mother-daughter bonding time in your second language when someone’s waving a giant serpent in your face. Creepy but interesting.

Despite the snakes, I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with my host mom. I really lucked out and I’m definitely going to miss her when I’m gone.