A Year in Villefranche sur Mer - Moving to France

  Day 3128 (Wednesday) 31 st December 2025 This is the statue of Apollo in Nice and this is the sunrise in Nice and this was our sunrise this morning. There was a cruise ship in the bay and the passengers had a lovely day to admire our little town. Let’s hope that it will be nice again tomorrow for our New Year’s Day lunch, which I organised, there are 24 of sitting down – should be great fun. There is a set menu so I don’t think we’ll be doing any food and wine pairings but read on to discover what goes with what. Food and wine pairings. They say what grows together goes together, and in the world of regional French pairings, the statement couldn’t ring truer.   While this statement shouldn’t always be taken literally (for example, we wouldn’t recommend sipping a Mourvèdre-dominant red from Provence with a salad nicoise), when coupled with the classic guidelines for food and wine pairing, this saying tends to always work. Keep in mind that tannins love fat...

  Day 3127 (Tuesday) 30 th December 2025 This is the I Love Nice sign this is Villefranche-sur-Mer’s beach in the summer and this is also Villefranche-sur-Mer, near where we park the scooter. It was a beautiful sunny morning so we decided to go to Monaco’s Christmas Market. It was pretty cold getting there on the scooter but it was lovely and warm when we stopped. We rode up to Casino Square to take this picture but the police asked us to move on pretty quickly. This photo is not mine. We parked near the market and walked along the front to find the entrance passing all the seafood stalls on the way. The market is bigger this year than last year with lots of chalets selling all sorts of stuff. Look at the colour of that sky. We saw this chalet selling ‘Welsh’, which is ham, cheese and bread – I wonder where they got the name Welsh from. We stopped for poutine and vin chaud, poutine is Canadian dish of chips, cheese, sausages and gravy – it was really nice and of course you can’t go...