Nice Was Nice

I know it is fairly late to be posting about this as we took this trip at the beginning of October, but time just seems to be flying by here.
In October my roommate and a few other friends of ours took off for a spontaneous weekend in Nice.  The weather was still fairly warm, and as the Mediterranean stays warmer much later in the year we passed most of the daylight hours of our two days there on the beach.  Like Cassis, the strand was all rock, but unlike Cassis these were sharp stones and uncomfortable to walk on.  Still the sun, the breeze, a relative lack of other people, and a few cans of cold Desperados and a bag of olives from the marché more than made up for that.  Our first (full) day we ate brunch at Le Pain Quotidien, which was pretty good and reasonably priced.  That it is a chain restaurant I would never have guessed from it's mom and pop (or rather maman et papa) scrubbed-wooden-tables-homemade-jam-served-on-mismatched-crockery charm. 
That evening we had dinner in one of the many seafood restaurants on the main square in old Nice.  I found out that raw oyster's give me nightmares.  Strange, as for most people they are supposed to be an aphrodisiac.  Our waiter was this strange man who insisted on speaking to us in English, although the only words he seemed to know were "yes" and "good."  As we were finishing our meal, by which I mean waiting for him to bring us the check, we witnessed him get into an argument with the couple sitting next to us.  The man wanted to pay with a card, but did not know his pin number, and since the waiter could not figure out how to print the receipt for him to sign he insisted that it was impossible to do so.  This went back and forth for sometime, and eventually the manager and another waiter were called over.  They crowded around the card reader for some time and randomly pressed some buttons, until they too declared it impossible to print and sign a receipt.  It finally escalated into the first waiter accusing the man of being a thief and trying to use a stolen card, the man then shaking his finger and asking them to call the police as surely they would back him up and sort it out, and the second waiter taking offense to this and warning the man not to threaten him, as he was "a dangerous man, a fighting man."  Finally one of them managed to press the right button by accident, the receipt printed, and all was solved.  We left the waiter a 20 centime tip, in solidarity for the poor man and his mortified wife.
After dinner we ended up at an English pub, with English barmen, and an English band playing covers of the Beatles.  Not exactly a typical French experiences, but nonetheless fun, especially when we got asked to dance by a group of French guys, local students and the only ones in the place close to our age.  They turned out to be quite nice and willing to talk to us, and we even met up with some of them the next day, after our picnic lunch on the hill overlooking the city, for a few more hours at the beach.  We left salty, windblown, and wishing it was as easy to make friends in Aix.