No. of Recommendations: 9
Last time I was in Monaco was on a $300 1 month Eurail pass 40 years ago & crashed for a couple nights in a youth hostel...
About 50 years ago for me, when at 12 years old my brother and I were taken along on a year's sabbatical traveling Europe with our parents, as they acquired materials for their foreign language education professions. We parked our 17' campervan in one of the clearly marked "no overnight parking" beachfront casino parking lots. When the police politely knocked on the door, promptly at midnight, Dad pretended not to speak French when asked to leave. The policeman, in a great accent, simply switched to English, telling us we could drive a couple of miles to parking by the roadside, under a cliff in France where we were free to park. Woke up the next morning to an international hang-gliding competition overhead. The professionalism and courtesy of that rejection was a stark contrast to the only other time we were forced to move on from our free camp site, which was in what was then Yugoslavia. Even though Dad had put up a handmade USA sign in the back of the camper due to cautions that we would be received in Yugoslavia as unwelcomed Germans, in a nation that still held understandable grudges from a few decades back, the response from the police when Dad replied truthfully that he did not understand, was to waive their machine guns sweeping from our vehicle to down the road, shouting LEAVE! in German. Dad surrendered, as even if he hadn't understood the German, it would be impossible to be confused about the gesture. I loved Yugoslavia.
As we were parked in the casino lot in Monaco, we noticed all the stunningly dressed people heading in to gamble. Decades later, an executive from our Swiss part of the company came over to our side of the pond, and because of my language skills I was put on the entertainment portion of his stay outside of meetings. He wanted to go to Atlantic City to see the casinos, and while I got together a willing group to do so, I cautioned him to dress down and not expect Monaco. Indeed you were more likely to see homeless people walking around with heads down looking for fallen quarters on the floor. He sadly agreed with my assessment after our visit, clearly disappointed.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
IP,
part gypsy
