Monaco

Ah, here I am at the last stop in our trip. We decided that we would hop the bus to Monaco for the last day of our vacation. We didn't have any particular goals in mind about where we wanted to go in Monaco, it just seemed like an interesting place to spend the afternoon.

John and I didn't rent a car for the entire trip. Generally speaking, unless we're in the U.S. neither of us gets too excited about driving in a place where we really don't know the rules of the road. And I have to say that the southern French are pretty aggressive drivers -- they put your average Chicagoan to shame! It didn't take us very long at all to figure out that it wasn't safe to step out into a crosswalk, even if the "walk" signal was present. Taxis are very expensive, so we defaulted to the easiest means of transport: the bus. The main bus line takes you to almost all the main cities you could want to visit: Nice, Grasse, Antibes, Cannes, Monte Carlo, Menton. Unlike Chicago buses, the buses in France were comfortable touring buses with big windows so that we could take in the sites. You definitely don't need to rent a car in the Cote d'Azure, even if you want to travel a bit and take in the sites.

The picture above is me trying to figure out where we are. Another very handy thing about French cities is the tourism information centers. All of them have free maps of the surrounding area -- very useful for people from places where the streets run more or less north-south and east-west.

The picture to the right is the harbor -- if you have an ultra luxe yacht, this is definitely the place to dock it. Some of these boats must have had more square footage than my house! You can also see a little bit of Monaco in the background. It's a very overbuilt place with expensive buildings and shops absolutely everywhere.

Our only real desitnation goal for the day was the Aquarium. Yep, forget palaces and wax museums, give me fish! It's not a huge aquarium (the upper half is dedicated to the sport fishing expeditions of the Monaco royality, the lower two floors contain a beautiful reef tank and examples of fish from a variety of areas, including the local Mediterranean species. The picture to the left was taken of the same harbor the boats are in from the top of the aquarium.

This picture really has no tourist value whatsoever, but I thought it was a neat pic -- they had a tube tank containing a bunch of small, schooling fish (I should remember the name of the species, because it's a common one, but I don't). John took it without a flash so as to avoid spooking the fish. He actually took quite a lot of fish pictures, but since you can find fish pictures almost anywhere, I'm just going to post the one and leave it at that.

There are some surprising things on the upper floors of the aquarium. One of them is an enormous whale skeleton (part of the trophy fishing collection) that makes you appreciate how big whales really are (there are also a number of other skeletons of smaller whales and dolphins, and all sorts of pickled sea creatures are in bottles along the walls.) Another is this stuffed polar bear (one of my few pictoral contributions to our trip). Not only is the bear an unexpected find, but John is also smiling in this picture!

Of course, no trip to a new city would be complete without a visit to a local cathedral. Not too far from the aquarium we were able to find one! Pictured here you can see the Cathedral de Monaco. We decided to avoid taking pictures inside (since there were people using the church as a house of worship and not just a tourist site), but we enjoyed the lovely artwork inside. This is the cathedral wherein the Monaco royal family is entombed. You can find Princess Grace's final resting place here along with a few other royal tombs. Not surprisingly, there were fresh flowers where Grace was laid to rest. Her memory obviously lives on long after her departure from the living.

The cathedral is on the edge of the old part of the city. I think if John and I hadn't already spent plenty of time in Cagne and Nice, we would have found it wonderfully quaint and decided to take pictures. But what we realized instead was that these quaint little areas are just the French equivalents of tourist traps, complete with t-shirt shops and places to buy panini and ice cream. Still pretty, but we decided not worth burning any more digital film on ("oh look, John -- another picture of narrow streets and quaint little houses!"... John and I have habit of taking lots of pictures of the same types of things while we are on vacation and then not being able to remember what they were.).

Such is the case with the artwork we discovered inside a little church just off the touristy area. I wish I had saved our map of Monaco so I could find the name of this lovely little sanctuary. Both of us were struck by the artwork on the ceiling and the statuary around the altar.

We figured that no trip to Monaco could possibly be complete without getting a look at the famous Casino de Monte Carlo. We aren't gamblers, but we've seen enough movies to be intrigued. Our walk back from the area around the aquarium took us by trendy shops and through some lovely gardens. We also had an interesting revelation about Monaco.

Remember how I mentioned that Nice drivers were not all that respectful of pedestrians in crosswalks? Well, Monaco is completely different. There aren't all that many actual stop lights, but there are quite a few pedestrian crosswalks. We more or less only had to think about stepping out into a crosswalk and the cars would stop! We have no idea why the driving styles are so different in Monaco... all we could come up with was better manners and expensive liability insurance for cars. But it was definitely nice not having to worry so much when we crossed the street.

I'll close this post and the Southern France travelogue with this shot of John in front of the Casino. He looks quite cross. Could it be because he wasn't dressed correctly for the Casino? Could it be because he has to fly back to Chicago soon? Could it be that his wife didn't tell him when to smile? The world may never know...

For some additional neat pictures of Monaco, check out this link