Leaving Monaco

Decided to leave Monaco for someplace different. Monaco is certainly pretty, and at 37€/night for Guizmo, it's not super expensive to stay here, but the place has a certain odd quality to it that, after a few days, makes you long for normal people putting in normal workdays doing normal work stuff.

The Monagasque seem to live to their mid-90's at the moment; they have the highest life expectency on earth. I don't know how to interact with someone whose life expectancy is at least 50%, or maybe even double, mine. I feel like saying "you seem to belong to a different species" or "enjoy the planet after I'm gone" or "I'll try to leave the place all nice and clean for you." I now understand how the replicants in Blade Runner, with a genetically programmed lifetime, must have felt.

They also have the highest per-capita GDP. Yet it's a strange place. You're more likely to find truffle oil on the menu of a restaurant than soap in the same restaurant's bathroom. Prince Albert II, whose rotund visage graces every corner, must be too busy having illegitimate children and displaying his wedding accouterments to worry about founding a sanitation department. Albert II the Rotund: if you ever read this, and judging by your life expectancy, you might have all the time in the world to surf the web in your old age, your fair country needs health inspectors! Also, as an aside, Charlene is too good for you.

But the real problem with Monaco is that, besides the few native Monagasque, everyone else here is transient and is unlikely to come back. So that basic fact undermines all human interactions. The merchants are mostly transplants who are here to make a quick buck and to move back to their more affordably priced hometowns in France and Italy. And what makes someone not try to rip you off is just basic human decency coupled with the fear of reprisal, in the form of missing out on future transactions and a bad reputation. The former does not go far enough, and when you know that you'll likely never see any given tourist again and that there'll be plenty of others just like him coming to Monaco thanks to the 007 movies, it'd be silly to be overly nice. This makes people at best brusque.

So I decided to go a little further east to Menton.

Palace of Albert and Charlene

On the way to and back from the aquarium, I mapped out the defense structure of Prince Albert II's palace. I hope it's useful to someone who wants to free Charlene from the clutches of His Rotund Blandness and elope with her.

On the way to her chamber, there are these arrow slits. They seem unmanned.

Beware of these on the approach

They've got some ancient cannons guarding the door. Plenty of ammo, but no gunpowder.

Cannons, large caliber, but not maintained

There's a dude pacing back and forth with an AR-15 rifle but he probably has not been issued bullets and has no communication device with which he can alert others. He has a menacing bayonet, but he doesn't look like the bayonetting type; he'd be deathly afraid of getting your blood on his trousers.

In any real army, standing at attention with feet at that angle would get you 100 pushups

Overall, the palace is a soft target and it seems like an easy task to get to Charlene. If you elope with the queen, do you automatically become king, or do you have to dispatch Albert the Rotund? I don't think I could do that. His visage, on constant display everywhere, has grown on me.

If you cross check this display against pictures of the wedding, you'll
notice that a tailor must have altered Prince Albert the Rotund's outfit
to make his gut look smaller

Here's a picture of Guizmo from the hilltop, occupying one of the best spots in the marina.

One of these boats is not like the others

Museum of Oceanography

Monaco's royal family doesn't all consist of boring and bland people (and I'm looking at you Prince Albert II. Actually, I was looking at Charlene, but that's because the whole place is covered with pics of the two of them, and I'd rather look at the prettier of the two). Prince Albert II the Rotund's great-great-grandfather, who lived in the late 1800's, took an interest in science, organized various expeditions around not only the Med but also up north to the pole, and is generally credited as being one of the early oceanographers. Many of his specimens have been collected in the Musee Oceanographique in Monaco, along with an aquarium.

Specimen collection back in the 1800's was not a nuanced and humane operation. In fact, it seems indistinguishable from whaling and fishing.

American tourists are here. Man the harpoons!

Ce n'est pas une pipe et, aussi, ce n'est pas une touriste americaine 

Harpoons

They used all sorts of contraptions for marine surveys, a remarkable feat at the time, and even more so considering that Albert the Premiere could very well have chosen to sit back at his seaside palace instead of enduring hardship aboard an oceanographic vessel.

Weird trap

Soundings in the pre-electronic age

There were some interesting diver suits. It must have taken a lot of courage to don these things.

An easy way to end up "sleeping with the fishes" as they say across the border

All he has, really, is an upside down jar with air in it, plus some lead

The aquarium was one of the better ones I've visited, well-worth the entry fee.

At my place of work, also, there is always someone doing the opposite of what everyone else is there to do

You're not as invisible as you think. And you're very tasty.

Flying fish are apparently ugly little beasts

I imagine these two moray eels having Statler and Waldorf-style discussions for life

These guys have been fished from the way deep. They still have that culture shock look to them.

I think these are piranhas

Nemo, where are you?

A pack of sea horses

They all live around a yellow submarine.

Gambling at the Monte Carlo in Monaco

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the gambling scene in Monaco is slow and boring, as it targets a very unusual demographic. The best way to characterize this demographic is simply to say "the kinds of guys who would marry Anna Nicole Smith at age 86." The place has an overall geriatric feel to it, so much so that there are external defibrillators every 100 feet on the way to the casino.

If defib doesn't cut it, they have a whole cardiac center just around the corner.
Death does not occur in Monaco.

I don't like to play games where I don't have an advantage, so gambling in a casino is not for me. But it was interesting to watch others gamble in Monte Carlo. Most people were gathered around roulette wheels, a game of pure chance and no strategy. And almost everyone seemed to be following a Mersenne-like betting plan where you mostly double-down.

A typical player would take out a few hundred euro in chips, place them on a bunch of singleton bets (where you pick a single number, with 1 to 36 payoff) amended with a few corners (where you cover four numbers, with 1 to 9 payoff). These bets would cover a third to a half of the board. If they lost, they'd take out another few hundred and repeat. If they won, they'd continue to bet the same way, this time with double the number of chits per bet. With more than 50% chance, the ball lands on a number they did not cover and they lose all their bets, but otherwise, this strategy seems to net around 2x gains in a win.

Needless to say, it's pretty easy to lose substantial sums of money this way. Watched a guy blow through 200 within a minute, plus more before I arrived. Spending that 200+, even on something frivilous, can make you a lot happier than whatever that guy must have felt during that minute. He looked around for sympathy after his second loss, and the pain in his face was palpable. 

There was one guy who got really lucky -- he won a singleton bet at least several times in a row while I watched. At his last win, I thought "ok, if he cashes out now, he's a lucky guy with perspective; otherwise, he either has a gambling problem or an embedded camera in his glasses and a computer in his shoe that tells him where the ball will end up." To his credit, he cashed out and got a gigantic plastic token that said 50,000 on it, plus a few thousand more. Not sure what he started with, but when I arrived at the table, he had less than 10K. So, not bad. 

No pics from the casino. They very diligently take away your camera.

Monaco

Ah, Monaco. I'd heard of the place, of course, but never really figured out its actual political situation, or its position on the map until now. It turns out to be its own independent country, completely surrounded by France. This area of France used to belong to the House of Grimaldi, with the surrounding area belonging to the Italian-speaking House of Savoy. Monaco somehow managed to maintain its autonomous situation, and became the world's densest country, with the highest per capita GDP. I've read up about it, but I still cannot make out why France tolerated this autonomous country within its influence zone. Anyhow, there it sits. And it houses Monte Carlo, with the famous casino where 007 movies were filmed.

I pulled into Port Fontvielle, one of the most amazing ports constructed partly out of a cliff face, and partly from reclaimed land. Stella (Guizmo's engine) developed transmission problems 0.2 miles out of the port entrance on a day with absolutely no wind, so I needed to get a tow into port. This meant that I could not pull into my assigned slot, and had to moor at the farthest spot on the outermost quay. This turns out to be the best spot in the entire marina. And it was all mine.

This cliff forms half of the marina

It looks cool when it is lit up at night

There is an oceanographic museum that was associated Captain Cousteau. I have not seen it yet but it is reputed to be worth seeing.

Musee Oceanographique, some of the prime real estate in Monaco

The place is covered with signs announcing Prince Albert's marriage to Charlene. Frankly, Prince Albert seems incredibly bland. He has a lot of resources at his disposal, and we've somehow never heard of anything from him or about him. His great-great-grandfather was an important figure in early oceanography in the late 1800's. This fellow is not at all interested in science, and is not even passionate enough to have a good scandal or two. These are the signs of a boring royal family. Anyhow, his smiling visage is all over the place.

Albert, posing in military regalia he'll never have to wear in the battlefield

This royal family, more than any other, loves to pose in military outfits. It's a bit weird, as I don't think they've ever had to, and nor will they ever have to in the future, wear those outfits on a real battlefield.
It's pretty clear that Albert got the better end of the deal with Charlene, who got a guy with a really large round head and two illegitimate children. It turns out that their palace is right above Guizmo, so I'm, practically, right outside their window. If Charlene changes her mind, there is a staircase leading down from the castle down to where I'm moored.

The big attraction in the town is, of course, the casino. I cannot provide any pics from inside the casino. One of the first things they do is take away your camera. But it has only 12 tables, and no baccarat! Could 007 movies have exaggerated how people live around here? What a disappointment. There are private gambling areas (salons privee), which I couldn't enter because I had forgotten to pack a tuxedo on my mini (obviously, I never had any intention of packing any formal clothing, but a jacket would have been sufficient, and maybe a good idea). In any case, if you've been to Vegas, you'll be disappointed in Monte Carlo. I was disappointed, and I haven't even been to Vegas. Monte Carlo was in a very grand building, but the gambling operation was ultimately much smaller than the tribal casino I went to in Mukilteo, in Washington State, on a lark during a car ride. And when the minimum bets are high, which they are here, and the average age of the gamblers is high, which it has to be for the gamblers to amass the kind of money required to play here, the games get played very slowly. The Monegasque way roulette is played, for example, involves a giant table and three croupiers placing bets on behalf of the players. This goes counter to American sensibilities, where the games are much faster and people place their own bets.

Monte Carlo

Hotel De Paris, next to the Monte Carlo
Note the posh cars lined up in the front. All of this opulence can apparently be rented, at reasonable rates.