Visiting Monaco in a T-Shirt and Sneakers

In true Charlsie fashion, I went to the most glamorous country in the world wearing a UNC t-shirt, sneakers, leggings, and a ponytail.

The Port of Hercules

I was really excited to go to Monaco because there is this whole storyline in Gossip Girl where Blair is engaged to the prince of Monaco, and also I wanted to up my country count (from 7 to 8, hehe). With an area of two square kilometers, Monaco is only 60% the size of Central Park in New York, and is the second smallest sovereign state in the world (behind the Vatican). However, it is the world's most densely populated state and is one of the richest countries per-capita, up there with Liechtenstein and Luxembourg.

A gold Ferrari? Bugatti? Lambo? I don't know... it's gold.

Most people living in Monaco weren’t born there, but the people who do live in Monaco are LOADED and they live FOREVER (life expectancy is 85.8, highest in the world). Buying a small one-room apartment in Monaco will cost you well over a million dollars. So, naturally, Monaco is built for the wealthy. There are famous luxury hotels (the Hotel de Paris is the most famous) and all of the luxury fashion brands have stores in Monaco. Two James Bond films shot at the Casino de Monte Carlo, and Monaco hosts the Formula One Grand Prix and some giant yacht show every year. I walked by a bank with a sign reading “wealth is just the starting point.”

The Hotel de Paris

The Casino de Monte Carlo

So, naturally, Monaco is not built for pedestrians like me. It’s built for people being driven in cars by chauffeurs. It would make a lot more sense for such a city to be bike-and-pedestrian based, but my guess is that most of the extremely wealthy people would rather sit in air-conditioned private vehicles, and since they make up a majority of the population, that’s what ends up happening. Lots of roads don’t even have sidewalks and most of the city is actually built on the side of a mountain, so you can’t just walk from point A to point B. They were also taking down all of the infrastructure from the Formula One race in May, so the construction made the foot and car traffic even worse. I had to take the bus back to the train station simply because I couldn’t figure out how to get down the mountain.

Maybe Monaco would be fun if you had a chauffeur and a reservation at a nice restaurant (like the Café de Paris) and money to burn at the casino or on Balenciaga and Versace, but I don’t have the dough for a chauffeur, I hate gambling, and my fashion tastes are simple. I could maybe have gone to a nice restaurant, but the food and wine in Nice is probably just as good, and a lot cheaper!