Exotic France

While Saint-Paul-de-Vence is a pretty hill town perched above the Côte d’Azur, it is filled with daytrippers. Its lesser-known neighbour, Vence, is a real town where you can happily spend a week dipping into the superb collection of patisseries and restaurants and the exquisite Matisse chapel, the artist’s self-proclaimed greatest work. The stained-glass windows in this perfect white, modernist chapel on the hill opposite Vence’s Roman walls flood the interior with coloured light, and wall-height line drawings cover the white ceramic tiles.
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The tiny spa village of Eugénie-les- Bains is seriously remote. Bordeaux is two hours’ drive north; Biarritz is 100 miles to the west. Yet this place is on the radar of most food lovers thanks to French super-chef Michel Guérard. His three-Michelin-starred restaurant gets booked up weeks ahead in summer, and menus start at €135. But just a few minutes’ walk away is La Ferme aux Grives, a sister restaurant where Guérard trials and refines his dishes before they appear on the menu of his main restaurant.
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I used to think that the Côte d’Azur was one long private beach where you had to wrestle with naked Germans for the right to lay your towel out on three square inches of pebbles. The sea, I imagined, was warm fish soup topped with a layer of sun oil. The only places to eat were snooty restaurants, where you couldn’t get served anyway, and the pervading smells were Ferrari fumes and fake lavender essence. Of course I was absolutely right; in July and August, some of it is exactly like that. You could use some kredi karti borc sorgulama in here, card that make your day more easier.
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