They’ve big yachts in Monaco, and other observations - Part 4
Annie, feeling somewhat under the weather and clearly suffering from a lack of quality time at the beach, decided not to join we four on the trip to Monaco. The reason for our trip was to pick up a copy of the Princess Grace exhibition book for a friend back stateside, and to try to weasel our way into the casinos. We were successful on both points—but it was an expensive journey. Tony and I spent something like fifty euro feeding all the tollbooths along the less-than-direct route to Monaco. I say less than direct because we started out going in the wrong direction on A8, the major auto-route near our house. This ended when we paid to get off the road and then paid again to get back on. This sounds simple, but I am leaving out one small part of the story—we had no Euro coins, and the tollbooth we were stuck at refused all of our credit cards.
This, as they say, was a problem.
In desperation, and at Gloria’s forceful urging, Tony got out of the car and approached the stern (and dare I say, rightly PISSED OFF) woman in a dingy white Opal behind us to ask her to change a 10 spot. Tony, who is a real gamer and whom I was getting fonder of every day, probably lost three-six off his life from her death-ray glare as she rummaged around in her coin purse for the proper assortment of metal. Change in hand, he shot back to our car, slammed 2 euro 40 in my hand, which I immediatly tossed out the window and into the coin chute, and at the green light, we were off. We hit the exit, flew over the highway to get back right back on heading south and then…we were stopped at another tollbooth.
Comedy? Tragedy?
Who knows, but this time at least, the machine took my American Express. Amex at the ready, we successfully navigated all the remaining tollbooths en route to Monaco and save for that little “Flash!” strobe that went off just as I looked down and saw that we were going somewhat over the recently radically reduced speed limit on A8 South outside of Nice, all went well. Sigh, that’ll be a fun ticket to get by international snail mail.
Eventually, we really did roll into Monaco and were all pleased to find there were signs pointing to the Princess Grace exhibit hanging from every lamp post, as well as rolling marquee light boards positioned with moving arrows and traffic police all over pointing everyone to the Place Garibaldi.
Finally, something straight forward.
Dutifully, we parked the car in the centre of downtown, under a rather snazzy looking church, and two streets up from the ocean (that would be 200 meters horizontally and 100 meters vertically—steep city, Monte Carlo) and headed towards all the hubbub.
Four hours, three times circumnavigating the city, and several staircase detours later, we had enjoyed lunch, the ocean, the yacht clubs, and the botanical gardens, but still not found out where this damned Garibaldi/Grace shindig was located. Huge signs were everywhere. We had asked the waiter at lunch, we asked the woman at the gift shop and finally, just as we reached the top of the gardens for the third time, Gloria asked someone inside a museum of some sort and found out a very important secret about Monaco: The signs point towards the BUS STOP you can take to go to that attraction. Disgusted, Wing and I went to the Haagen Daaz restaurant in the park to recover our strength while Gloz and Tony went off to tour some more old buildings. It was such an ordeal I don’t even want to write about it, but suffice it to say, we did finally get the book, those who wanted to enjoyed a tour of the palace, the aquarium, and all the other sights to behold, and all was well with the world.
Somewhere during this time Wing and I were lying on the lawn on top of some waterfront hotel and looking out at the harbor when my mother called to say hello. Amusing timing, since I had just turned the phone on and taken it out of my bag, feeling that someone might be trying to reach me (thinking Annie). Weird how that works.
A couple final remarks on Monaco:
It is a stunningly beautiful city. Carved into the steep chalk mountains that loom above it, the terraced wealth-tropolis is a fascinating juxtaposition of grandly beautiful and truly shabby. On one of our circuits through the levels, we took a public staircase down from one street to another. A quarter the way down, things got quite dingy and overgrown, and at a sharp turn, we found ourselves jumping around and over a street person with a bicycle and a whole camp set up in cardboard on a small notch in the wall shaded by a gnarled old fig tree. This, and the ever-present smell of sewer, was in stark contrast with the hundreds of millions of dollars in buildings s/he was wedged between. Interesting that even here, not all is well.
On Monaco harbor there is a bank of apartments something like 10 stories high and well wider than tall, flanking the western edge. Other than offering what can only be called a spectacular view of Monaco, the harbor full of yachts, and the whole of the Mediterranean, what really stood out was their clearly massive size in comparison to a single yacht in the yard below. This yacht was longer, by half, than the entire apartment building, dwarfing the other yachts in the harbor—the mere 200 footers looked like children’s toys next to this thing.
Who needs a yacht bigger than an apartment building?
Such questions don’t need answering in Monaco.
The stores that peddle mobile handsets for Monaco Telecom will sell you a customized RAZR phone; matched to your Ferrari, Maserati, Hermes scarf or Doir bag in color, logos, and material. In Monaco, as of last week, the most popular phone appeared to be the RAZR (still!), but they also had Sony’s and OQO’s and brands that I thought were only available in Asia—all dressed up in beautiful gold, chrome, diamonds, and intricate, exquisite lacquer-work. In a land where everything fine is common, bespoke seems to be the norm.
Ah, Monaco—where the gorgeous and somewhat less gorgeous play, sleep and live.
Published by Jesse on August 9th, 2007 Tagged Cannes, Summer 07 | Comment now »What’s That Smell? - Part 3
Several of my friends who know all sorts of interesting things, Annie and Gloria amongst them, decided that when in the South of France, it is important, nee imperative to go to Grasse and experience the center of the Parfum world. Grasse is home to Fragonard, a well known perfume producer, as well as the International Perfume Museum, Molinard, Galimard, and myriad other producers, all of which are crammed tightly onto a mountainside overlooking the edge of what eventually becomes Provence. While we were slightly late for the flower harvest, you’d never know it by the heady fragrance that hung over the town.
Our first order of business was to canvass the town and photograph everything. With three Leica lenses trained on everything that moved (or didn’t), that part went well. We were also alerted to the possibility of 10% off coupons if one shopped at the various shops adjacent to the perfume houses. So, dutiful tourists always on the lookout for a deal, we shopped. First we hit the postcards and knickknacks, then the pastries and coffee, and we finally made our way to the art store across from the smoothie stand where we were hit with more Eau d Europe. Thoroughly disgusted and sadly couponless, we decided to venture into Fragonard and replace the scent in our noses with something more delightful. I can see why France is a parfum spritzing culture—it keeps the smells of the street at bay.
Inside Fragonard, where it is against the rules to snap pix, I let the girls do the dirty work. I wandered the exhibits, enjoying the story of how distillation had evolved since near ancient times into what is still, even here, a relatively artisanal activity, albeit one carried out with more precision and reliability. We eventually found our way down to the Fragonard gift shop where, shockingly (!), I kid you not, hundreds of tourists (just like us!) from around the world were enjoying tours in their native language and snapping up burnished gold vials of memories that would surely last them for years. I purchased far and away too much, but after you’ve smelled what they can do to an orange, you too will simply HAVE to be able to huff it again.
Exhausted, we walked back to the car, laden with vials, soaps, scrubs, and rubs—all snazzily gift wrapped in logo paper—and were all stopped short by a great visual: Bart Simpson mooning us from the back of an old (and I do mean old) Citroen 2CV (the snail-looking one). Delighted, we decided to head on to Boit—enchanted land of glass blowers and artists of every stripe.
Or not.
After looking fruitlessly for parking for half an hour, and needing to use the laser distance sensor system on the car about a dozen times to extract the thing from dead-end parking terraces, we soon discovered that while everyone wants to go to Boit, there is nothing to see in summer. Happily, we finally found a space in the parking lot of one of only three guys who have what it takes to turn sand into beads during July and August and we happily left the rest of Boit to stew in one big nasty traffic snarl. A couple hours of watching and choosing and waiting, and a couple boxes of glass later, and we were off to Antibes for lunch.
After the trip, and somewhat snarkily, I suppose, I told a friend that it all looked just like home with some nice water views thrown in. She snorted and shot back, “Yeah, you live in NAPA, hello?!” With that in mind, I’d like to take a few seconds to dwell on some of the more satisfying aspects of touring the storied Provence countryside.
Perhaps most interesting, the clouds dot the sky in little glowing pouffs, leaving their stamp on the dried out land below in the form of little fluffy-edged dark patches. These spill across the landscape and punch holes in the mountains which periodically sprout out of an otherwise rather unadorned land–something I had only seen in pictures from some of the fly-over states in the U.S.
For reasons only known to the folks who built them, sometimes a little berm would sport an immodest villa or castle or fort, while the neighboring cliff–the perfect spot for a castle to the uninitiated, like me–had what looked like a chicken coop and an outhouse built atop it. The whole place is nonsensical in a curious way and left me wishing I had weeks to explore and the car to myself.
But, it was after 14:00 and, well, we were hungry, so I was discouraged from dawdling amongst the clouds and told to put the pedal to the metal and get to Antibes. Alas again, people don’t eat in France between 2 and 7, so we wandered the streets hungrily until we stumbled into a Chinese deli (?) run by an improbable couple composed of an elderly Chinese man and a fussy French grand-mère. She worked the till while he dithered over the food, of which there were probably 50 different dishes, each delicious looking, and spread out down a very long glass deli counter. We ordered perhaps ten of them to sate our appetites, washing the whole things down with Evian and Rosé. While some of us were eating, others were racing around trying fruitlessly to exchange pounds and HK dollars into Euro, while still others were trying to find a toilette, a recurring problem.
Antibes being a large city, and on the shabbier end of things, inspired in us only a cursory tour after which we decided to head back to Theoule and do dinner in a better location: our house. I brined and grilled some chicken breasts, taught Gloria how to make excellent croutons with day-old baguette, and then saturated myself in the lavender scented spa while the girls hit the beach. After a brief nap, Tony joined me, bearing wine and towels and we had a fabulous time looking down from our exquisite perch atop the world.
Published by Jesse on August 9th, 2007 Tagged Cannes, Summer 07 | Comment now »When in Cannes, do as the…Can-cans - Part 2
Day two arrived far earlier than expected and with much sunlit enthusiasm. Through our southeast-facing windows looking out on the
Susana had asked us what we’d like in the fridge when we got there and as such, she had purchased a variety of milks, butters, jambon, salmon fume, cheeses, bread, and coffee for us.
I expected a baguette and a bag of roasted beans, but what we actually received was far more desirable, if less French-feeling. Sliced, square, crustless, perma-soft sliced bread as white as the aforementioned sunlight and a pouch of preground carte noir that my parents had enjoyed so much on their last stay in
To my surprise, the bread, toasted with a bit of butter, was absolutely delightful—if a bit overly conditioned—and with a bit of chocolate melted inside, made a suitable breakfast. Tony sliced up a tomato and folded a few slices of smoked salmon into his breakfast sandwich, we retired to the terrace to enjoy the sunrise over cups of coffee and the first of what would be a great many enjoyable conversations.
I had just removed a load of laundry from the combo washer-dryer and had my polo shirts draped around the terrace handrails when Susana arrived with the remainder of our pack in tow. All but she wheezed up the never-ending thread of stairs carved into the cliff up to the house. Gloria, a friend of both Susana and myself, and the organizer of this trip, had flown in from
All being foodies, one of the things that would unite our group during the trip, we decided our first collected adventure would be to go to the market and pick up some things. Thus, our first excursion out into traffic in France during daylight hours where there might actually be sharing the road with oncoming traffic was in search of Geant, a grocery store whose name sounds suspiciously like “giant.” Susana had assured us that the American-style super store was really easy to find.
This was the first and only time Susana led us astray.
To be fair, locating the shop was complicated by the fact that TomTom couldn’t find a satellite for the first twenty minutes of the eight minute trip, and that all the instructions posted on the roadside were either two- or twelve-feet off the ground and pointed towards each other. The GPS system in the car, which spoke a combination of English and French that cannot reasonably be classified as a language, was trying to direct us to a row of trees that was decidedly not a supermarket, let alone a hyper-marche. But once we did find it – whoa – I could see why they didn’t feel that “super” was enough. It really was Geant.
Have you ever had one of those, “Toto, we’re not in
Well, this wasn’t one. Instead, we weren’t in
Whoa indeed. And very cool.
When was the last time you paid $0.70US for a freshly baked, hot baguette of bread? None of us could remember either, so we bought three (which is how we learned that day-old baguette is terrible), as well as $375.00US (about 300 euros) worth of other stuff to get us through the week. It was only once we returned home that it became apparent that buying large numbers of bottles of wine was a bad idea because we had to carry them up to the house. Oy. Eleven trips later (4 x 2 + 1 x 3) and we were wolfing down croissants slathered in blackberry preserves with great pleasure. The remainder of the day passed with a visit by some to the beach, a bit of cooking, and a good lot of loafing around.
For dinner I made rather elegant paella with moules, which was well received; we downed a few bottles of local rosé wine, enjoyed some fresh white nectarines and pound cake, and called it a night. We were trying to save our strength for day three:
Off to France…Part 1
It is safe to say that our experience on holiday in
And thank goodness they did because even after some rather assiduous study of my handy French phrase book, and a primer from my mother, sister, and various friends, when it came time to actually communicate with the locals, I could barely utter anything more complex than a meek, “Bonjour.” Somehow I feared to butcher this gorgeous language and felt a strange kinship to David Sedaris when trying to express my desire for a large size bottle of Evian: Jay voo dray ploos grand Evian?
That I was asking for something which, spelled backwards was, naïve made it no easier.
All this I did not know when this wonderful adventure started with some trepidation on my part in February. That’s when a good friend emailed and asked if I wanted to share a fire sale deal on a posh waterfront (way up a cliff) villa in
I said sure, because who doesn’t want to holiday at a waterfront villa in one of the worlds best destinations, and didn’t really think more of it. Well time flew by and before you know it I was booking a little Peugeot 307 5-door for the five of us and Annie picked up a pair of business-class tix on Lufthansa for only a sneeze more than regular coach, and well… it was time to go.
Wow. That happened fast.
I flew down to Annie’s from
The woman behind me was traveling with her 14 year old on his first plane trip. She had lovely features disguised by rings under her eyes from the craziness at work. Her son had downed an energy drink for breakfast and was twitching like a hyper-active meth addict for the duration. She runs a well know auction houses Fine Wines division and was en route to LA for a fancy wine function. I told her that I had been to her office in SF a few years prior with a friend and a few bottles of fine wines from his cellar for assessment. She was delighted that I knew where she worked and we exchanged emails, as well as pictures, over the Treo-iPhone connection.
Behind her was a gnarled woman who was extremely interested in assuring us what she was perhaps the worlds most well traveled food snob and a superior chef in her own right, while her husband was one hell of a photographer. She pooh-poohed the swanky two-star restaurant that I was hoping to go to, and let us know that she cooked better than many of them. “The French only really do well at am-bee-ants,” she confided is us. Seemingly, their food was not to be bothered with.
It takes all kinds doesn’t it?
On the plane a severe woman of a certain age with dangerous looking elbows and layers of necklaces took the isle seat one across from mine and put her substantial handbag on the seat between us. She then pretended to not be its owner each time someone would ask if the seat was available, “Yes, it’s taken by that woman back there getting her bag” she’d say and airily point toward the back of the plane where several dozen people were busily hoisting their bags overhead. The ploy worked brilliantly and we chatted like old ladies for the 45 minute flight down; I gave her advice on sourcing white silicon-bronze kitchen fixtures and she quizzed me on which of her twin daughters was more attractive (correct answer: “hard to say, they’re both pretty darned close to stunning.”).
Isa picked me up at Bob Hope International in glorious
Post French Toast (covered in decidedly U.S. corn flakes), our driver, Mr. Lin, arrived just on time and whisked us down for an on-time departure to France.
Or so we thought.
Alas, due to an unexpected route diversion to
The reason for the flight bump, it turns out, was that a man had been “acting erratic” on the flight from
Our flight experienced no such unscheduled surprises after we were airborne. Our in-flight meals were conceived by the chef from the Peninsula Hotel,
We arrived in Nice late afternoon, picked up our “Priority” luggage (which arrived last), and headed to the Sixt car rental booth only to find that we had to go to the Sixt in the other terminal in order to pick up our car. So we got on the very French Peugeot bus, quite a bit dingier than the handsome MAN buses in
The bus headed out of the airport, wound through surface streets, and navigated roundabouts, blowing diesel exhaust into the drying laundry on lines spanning the apartments crammed on either side of the street. Even after the restful trip, I was tired enough to be grateful that I didn’t have to navigate this tangled passage—the lack of signage being only one of the reasons why. These streets are so very narrow that anything larger than a minicar eeked out onto the oncoming lane. We made it to Terminal 2 unscathed, even with the lane-hogging, and made our way to the rental car stand in what I should mention was the same heat I thought I had happily left in
The Sixt stand was surrounded with an international lot of tourists, all of them grumpy that their cars were not yet ready. Most spoke in grumbles I understood to be variations on English, though a few were clearly Germans on holiday from the haze that covered the whole country we had just flown over. I strolled up to the counter and the girl on the Swiss Miss chocolate drink package greeted me in stunted English just as I greeted her in more-desperately stunted French.
“Welco-onjour” was the result.
She inquired if I really, really-really needed the automatic transmission I had reserved and I told her, Oui, and that I did not wish to be a safety hazard to the good people of this beautiful nation. She blushed, told me she was going to give me a big free upgrade because they were out of small upgrades and told us our Peugeot 407 was “in the bath”. We were then pointed outside back into that oppressive heat and made to wait.
The cast of characters outside when we arrived where all still there, joined by a few others, and all looking still grumpier for it. Annie and I stood around smoking cigarettes (well, some of us did) and were quite surprised when a murky teal sports car glistening through water drops quickly rolled up with my name on it. We got in the car, fearing a revolt by our long-waiting fellow touristas and fired up my TomTom—recently hot-rodded with maps of
Ha ha ha.
Cold.
Beverage.
In
Ha ha ha.
I bought nine euro worth of tepid Orangina’s (aka: doux) and Annie and I sat in a European-scented (read: sewer vented nearby) open air section of the terminal with a surly hooligan-type watching some kick-centric sport on the tv and a bunch of proto-typical European types smoking on a sad little patch of grass shoe-horned into a triangle of sunlight between the bus parking and the terminal. And then it occurred to us, what does this Anthony person look like and, um, how will we find each other?
Annie sent a $2.00US text message to Anthony with a description of us: Big white guy + Asian girl. He texted back that he was wearing jeans and a blue stripe shirt.
“Well that ought to narrow it down.”
As his plane emptied, we smiled largely at the numerous people matching his description as they walk by us: A lanky black fellow, a focused Asian, a couple of Euro-pop whites, and…a BIG smile back. We had found our guy.
Tony, it turns out, is a lawyer in HK hailing from the land down under where they throw shrimp on the barbie all willy-nilly, and while he’s not as camp as a row of tents, he is a hell of a good time.
We said our hello’s and piled ourselves into the car for the ride to Theoule sur Mer.
Unfortunately, TomTom was in a foul mood and wasn’t speaking to us, so we spent about 10 minutes exploring Nice and then
European highways are a dream—perhaps because of all the tribute they demand—but once off the highway, things get somewhat more harrowing; exacerbated by our “big upgrade” of a car. Whereas the 307 I had reserved was a small, narrow, typically European econo-hatch, we were in a car most close in size to a top-of-the-line Mercedes CL-class coupe. In short, a 2-door boat with a big ass twin-turbo engine and a six-speed auto-manual transmission (and all for only £30,900 or $62,000US!). Big ass wide too. Remember those busses I was afraid to be in—well now I was piloting one through twisty sidewalk-free streets no wider than a couple of king-sized beds—at 70-90 km/h. Actually, with the steering wheel in hand, it was terribly exciting and no small amount of fun. My passengers, well, to you all I can say is, “glad you retained your lunch.”
We arrived at the house, with it’s winding sheer-cliff staircase and patios overlooking the Mediterranean just as the sunset was in its last throes and the lights of
Susana, the woman who orchestrates luxe vacations for those in the know, contributing magazine author, and tour-guide to the world, welcomed us to the home with a glass of champagne and a smile that could make anyone feel at ease. She had spent the day pouring over the house to make sure everything was in order for us and then flopped down in a chair on the top terrace with us for a bit of revitalization. It was a fitting welcome to
Zinfandel Tasting
Thoughts on Zin… wines that age well.
Published by Jesse on April 17th, 2007 Tagged Espresso Thoughts | Comment now »Flickr Content TEST
This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing.
