Here is a picture from Menton's citrus festival:
I have real pictures too. And maybe I'll even show them to you.
They're...
fine.
And so is the citrus festival.
And so is Menton.
Actually, Menton is kind of great and horrible. Gorgeous ocean, magnificent old town scoring probably as high as an eight on the Seussian Scale of old towns. The shops, bakeries, and restaurants look pretty nice, though after several months around here I've come to recognize sadly how many of them are chains, even if they're maybe more local chains than international ones, but plenty of those international ones too. And when one comes to a pedestrianized street, almost exclusively leading into and through the old town, it really is a lovely place. There is absolutely nothing like it in the country I come from.
And then, unavoidably, are the roads.
Where the citrus festival centers, it is along a kind of parkway center between two streets that they apparently couldn't bear to close entirely off, a kind of grand boulevard ruined for any real use by its devotion to traffic. The ocean too, of course, is lined by a road with its unholy roar of cars, buses, and motorcycles racing urgently along it, and though there are a number of lovely squares and sidewalk restaurants, a big road full of traffic always seems just around the corner, like there's this pretty little city for tourists, mixed artfully in, but the real city is a working city for suburbanites, a... Dubuque Iowa.
I believe this has seeped into the very soul of Menton and is expressed in the magnificent citrus festival displays themselves. A lion, giraffes, a woman, pelicans, parrots, these giant magnificent sculptures are entirely made out of citrus fruits, mainly oranges and lemons, until one gets to, like, the important parts; the giraffes' heads, the woman's face, the paws of the lion, and the head of the parrot, and then, all of a sudden, they are no longer made of fruit, they're plaster, or fiberglass, or whatever is usually used for giant cast figures like that. And it's not bad. It's so not bad we're all willing to overlook it,
but, let's not lie...
It's not quite amazing, is it?
And neither is Menton.
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