Tags
casino, France, gambling, luxury hotels, Monte Carlo, postaday2012, travel
The last time that I was in Monte Carlo, I had just turned twenty-one but my sister was only seventeen so we couldn’t go into the Casino which was fine because with my frugal nature we wouldn’t have done much gambling anyway. This time I was excited to bring my daughter into the Casino for some touristy gambling and by that I meant the slot machines, that’s as far as I go, put as little into the machine as possible and pull the lever hoping for Lady Luck. We didn’t win that day but we had fun.
I remember that my impressions of the Monte Carlo of twenty years ago were of a city that was more intimate, less crowded and quieter. The day that I took all the pictures, perhaps it was a holiday, but there were so many tourists, almost too many. It felt very crowded and rushed, not the elegant tranquility of my memories.
Would I go back to Monte Carlo, I don’t know. I feel that the whole Cote d’Azure has been overbuilt and has lost a lot of its former charms. Before, you had a sense of stepping into another world, now you feel as if you are all sharing everyone else’s world because you are all on top of one another.
I think that you can still get that sense of another world off in the Collines of Provence where you aren’t near the sea and therefore your real estate isn’t overpriced or blown way out of proportion for what it is essentially. When they say it’s all location, location, location; the Cote d’Azure was high on the list for examples of that saying.
I’m glad that I took the baby girl there, it is a place to visit just because you get a glimpse of a life that is so removed from the ordinary that it has to be seen. I think that it is a perfect place to understand how someone can just have too much money where it almost becomes a weight on their shoulders or a burden, the always searching for the next thing that is a must have, or the next thing in vogue or the next person that you must meet. I think that I would be too exhausted by all that after a while.
laurieanichols 