monaco-monte carlo

With our dress clothes packed away in our day packs, we took the 30 minute or so train ride to Monaco, home of the world famous Monte-Carlo Casino. Monaco is sort of part of France, but is technically it's own country, even though it is only about one square kilometer in size! It also has the world's hightest per-capita income, and you could tell by all the glitzy yachts in the harbour and all the fancy cars zooming around.

The main draw is obviously the casino, but we spent some time walking around the town (country! lol) too. We walked up the hill to the Palace and got a great view of the whole country on either side. On the way down we met this guy from Toronto and actually ended up spending a few hours hanging out and walking around with him. He was just in town on business for a few days, staying in Nice as well. He works for some organ transplant company and he was there to "escort" an organ back home to Canada. We checked out the Monte-Carlo quickly but couldn't get very far because of the dresscode. We looked around some of the shops in the area - Gucci, Prada, Vuitton, any designer you name it and they had their own store. Not to mention all the jewelry stores with ridiculously priced pieces. We felt pretty out of place in our shorts and flip flops! haha.. It's weird the confidence clothing can give you; once we had changed we felt a lot better!

We said by to our new friend and then went out to a nice (and surprisingly cheap!) restaurant for some dinner before heading back to the Monte-Carlo. It was funny, you're not allowed to bring any bags in, but we had to try and get them to let us, saying that our nice clothes were in there and we had to use the bathroom to change! haha..They finally let us. When we were done we each paid our 10 Euro cover charge and were in! This was just into the main room though; there are also other private gaming rooms that require another 10 Euro and the guys have a stricter dress code of jacket and tie. It wasn't really a typical casino like I was expecting. It was just a huge room, pretty quiet with a bunch of old men sitting around roulette and a few card tables, no noisy slot machines or anything. The minimums were really high, and these guys were gambling with ALOT of money. We asked at the change counter for like 10 Euro worth of chips just for souvenirs, and the guy looked at us like we were crazy and basically said that you couldn't even sit down at any of the tables with such a small amount of money. We didn't care what he thought though! Neither of us played anything there (sorry Mike, no poker tables! hahah), but we did take 10 Euros and play the slots for a while. Of course we didn't win anything, but it was more about the experience of being at the Monte-Carlo!

After we were done there we took some pictures outside and made our way back to the train station. At this point I had taken off my shoes (hadn't worn heels in almost 6 months!) and resorted back to my flip flops. It was also freezing cold so I just put my sweater on over my dress and my capris on underneath. I don't think it looked nearly as bad as that probably sounds though, lol.