Monaco/Monte Carlo

Hilary, Zac, Katio, Lindsay, Cory, and I all took a train to Monaco on Thursday after class around 4 p.m. We arrived around 5 p.m. and could not believe the beautiful view from the train station! Monaco is a stacked setting city where you have to take stairs to get to certain places. When we got off the train we were significantly above sea level. We figured out from someone at the train station that our hotel we were staying in for the night was only a fifteen minute walk. Some of the girls wanted to try and hail a cab but they did not seem to want to stop for us. So we wandered the streets of Monaco looking for our place. I took the lead and guided us to a dead end...so one of the guys decided to take charge! haha Thankfully it only took us about 30 minutes to find it. We were surprised to see it was a very nice hotel...better than what we have been staying in at JLP. Our room was very modern and spacious. Hilary, Zac, and I shared a room together. We set our bags in our place and decided to explore. Once we got out of our place we found stairs that looked like they leaded to a subway but they led us to the beach instead. Right above the beach level there was a beautiful park with a snack bar and breathtaking scenery. We had to take an elevator from this level down to the beach. It was a picturesque view of the sea with all the boats and cruise ships. We hung around here for a little and took a lot of pictures. Afterwards we ventured out to find the famous Casino Royale. We discovered a very nice bar buddha connected to it as well that we thought we should check out later. Hilary and I went off on our own to wander around the back of the casino. It was gorgeous and there were all of these hotels rooms connected under ground throughout it. We took lots of pictures here as well. It was very beautiful scenery and I was very jealous of all the extremely wealthy people who get the chance to stay there! We met back up with everyone and walked throughout the streets of Monte Carlo. There were a countless number of designer stores we were dieing to go in but they were all closed. We went back to the snack bar place from early and had a quick snack before we got ready for the night. That night we went to a random restaurant we found and had delicious meals. We had some complication with our waiter but we were able to straighten it out. We then ventured to a bar we spotted and hung out in there for a little while...we were the only ones in there, so I suppose it was not very popular. Afterwards we were able to get into the buddha bar and socialized with a few people for a little while. Then Lindsay, Katio, Zac, and Cory wandered off and Hilary and I went to this bar named Jimmys. We snuck in with another big group walking in. It was very cool and entertaining...the only bad thing was that one drink was 20 euros! Later on Lindsay and the rest of them tried to get in and well and the bouncers would not let them. So needles to say they were kind of upset with us for getting in but we were not about to leave! We had a great time mingling around and pretending we were posh! The next morning we had to check out around 11 a.m. and thankfully Lindsay, Cory, and Katio decided to stay for another night so we put  our stuff in their room to stay for the day! We went exploring again, this time we saw the famous Hotel de Paris where a lot of movies are filmed. We were able to see the Casino from the front but we were too under dressed to go in. I noticed there were all these random stadium seating stands throughout Monaco/Monte Carlo and we realized it was from the grand prix car race that had just ended on Sunday. Some of the streets still had reminiscences of car racing decorations. The streets are very narrow and winding, I have no idea how someone could race on that! We explored a lot of the history on Grace Kelly in Monaco as well. It was very neat to read about what she did. After that Hilary and I went back to the hotel got our stuff and rushed to the train station the make one of the early trains. We arrived just as it was about to leave and we quickly hopped on. When we got back to JLP we both passed out for about four hours. Then we woke up did some work and planned our adventures for Saturday. Saturday we went to Old Nice, Eze, and Ventimiglia. I will write more details on this later and post all of the beautiful pictures!