The French Adventure: Monaco

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The 24^th , before having dinner in the evening with the newly-weds' friends and family, we all decided on traveling to Monaco. Personally, I would recommend everyone to skip visiting it, cause there's really nothing very special interesting to see.

For the first time in my life, we took a touristy hop on hop off bus. This was not my idea, as it heavily violates the hypocritical division I make between tourists and travelers. I consideration myself a traveler, and those buses are for tourists! (Yet I know in the back of my head that I too am a tourist, but I like to forget that). However, my first experience with these buses was not a good one. After 5 minutes, I couldn't bare listening to the guide's voice anymore, as there was absolutely no interesting knowledge to be gained from this.

After an absolutely amazing icecream at the Cafe du Paris in Monaco, we walked over to a big apparently very popular casino. Being in my shorts, I obviously was not allowed inside, but the outside of the building was quite nice. Yet, I personally was fascinated with the massive silver-colored ball that worked as a mirror of it's surroundings (see the pics somewhere on this page). The walk back to our car along the harbor was quite nice, but not superduper amazing. It was interesting to see though that the place where the Monegasque royal family lives actually looks like a castle, like the ones you see in fairy tales.

After this Monegasque delusion, we went off to Saint-Paul-de-Vence for dinner with newly-weds and a walk around the village. This village had more to offer than Monaco, as it consisted of actual nice old buildings and cute small streets. Even the roads we walked were pretty as they were made up of stones that formed little suns together. After this short but quite delightful walk, it was time for another dinner in which my language skills would be heavily tested (just like in the past evenings) due to variety of the languages spoken of the newly-weds' friends and family. I must say, having to talk and understand Dutch, German, English & French all at once is bit too much... (And here I thought switching from English to Dutch and back at university was already complicated)

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