Off to Nice for the Carnaval today. We had a mad dash from the bus to the train only to find the train was delayed... and then delayed all the way to Nice... but luckily that gave us time to get the day's schoolwork done before arriving.

So, we headed first to the shops, then the Jardin du Paillon for (possibly?) the best playground so far this trip, then down to the beach where we were slightly surprised to see it was as pebbly as Brighton so after some stone skimming we headed back to Place Messena to find a place for the carnival parade only to find huge queues for security and over an hour wait in line before we could get in, but luckily we managed to get through before it started.

The carnaval was great - there were floats covered in fresh flowers as well as dancers, bands, stilt walkers, huge balloons and dinosaurs. The theme was 'King of the energy' and there were some interesting (and quite political) floats but I think I enjoyed the dinosaur stilt-walkers the most.

Then just when we thought it was all over they started throwing the flowers into the crowd and the floats were slowly dismantled in front of our eyes as the children both gathered a huge bouquet of flowers each to take home! A great twist on the traditional carnival and we all enjoyed taking our flowers back to Bob with us!