London one-way!

Steps: 23,042

Blame it on Monacco – we got up and caught the 10.05 to Monacco, with much difficulty – first we had to try and buy the tickets, then we had to find the train – it was one of those six seater booth trains like in the old days, but we did get ‘Eurotrip’ flashbacks! hehe

Monacco is definitely the playground of the rich and famous – both mariners had heaps of huge expensive boats. The whole palce is built in the mountains on the ocean, you take public lifts to go up and down the hills if you’re not fit enough. We walked down the hill alongf the road where the Grand Prix is held, and up the other mountain to the Grimaldi Palace where Prince Albert lives. It had some great views and we saw the guards change their post.

We went to the aquarium which was really good, it had been commissioned quite a while back by Prince Rainier. There were some beautiful fish there, and especially the mediterranean fish that I’ve never seen before – they came in bright pink and orange and electric blue! The museum part houses a tribute to global warming including the dog sled Prince Albert used last year to trip the artic.

I got what I thought was a small roll with brie and tomato and lettuce for lunch, you know, try and be healthy and all that, turns out it was made in a chocolate croissant! Damn good though, can’t talk – we had two gelatis each today – at opposite ends of the day!

I got so excited walking through Monacco’s shops – they had those bracelts with your name on it, and for the first time ever they actually had one with my name MARA!!! I was so tempted to get it!

Then we had to hike all the way back down the hill and up and across to catch the train back. We wandered through the backstreets of Nice where we found nice butchers, fresh macaroon cookies (I just had ´to make myself walk away while Lis was buying up!), and the yummiest gelati shop. In my bid to try new things I had pistaccio and fig – the fig was delicious, it tasted like you just picked it up off the tree and ate it!

There was a lot happening, all these streets were alive with people, a marching band, a hay bale stacking competition, and even a rock, paper, scissors competition! We spent some time on the front watching all the activity on the stone beach. I think I counted 5 topless women but they were all old or anorexic – nothing worth seeing (think that scene from ‘There’s something about Mary’ where Magda’s burnt rubbery boobs are flopping about!!!)

After a short siesta (Lija and I both had sun headaches, an hour’s sleep got rid of them) we headed back out for dinner to this restaurant where earlier had been a flower market, but at night turns into arts and crafts, mostly jewellery. Lija and I had all-you-can-eat mussels for dinner! Something like 9euro got you a heap to eat, and we just powered through them. I got al la natural the first time, then went for the salsa – hot chilli that blew my brains out! We went for a drink at ‘Wayne’s Bar’ afterwards – a very Aussie pub with a very cute Australian Orlando Bloom look-a-like server Luke.

Supposedly it gets to a stage where everyone’s on the tables dancing but we didn’t stay that long cos the smopke was getting to us and it’s an early start in the morning!

 

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.