The Posh Casino

Monaco is famous for three main things:
1. Its posh casino.
2. The mad F1 Grand Prix.
3. Being the only island in the world not entirely surrounded by sea.

I'll talk about the first of those. We visited the casino on Saturday night. Because it was posh we all wore black tie (and dresses for the girls and Bert). Sadly, this wasn't "the only passport we'd need to get in" as our taxi driver claimed and we did also need an actual passport. This was ok for most of us but our small Welsh friend had to wait in a bar outside for the evening as he'd left his in Nice.

Inside, it's very opulent. Perhaps the best thing is that the drinks are much cheaper than in the bars and hotels immediately outside. Outside it's about thirteen Euros for a beer. Inside, just six and a half. That's still expensive but it felt cheap! I also managed to get one round on the house. Not sure whether it was because I was smart, polite or just a repeat spender. I certainly don't think it was due to my grasp of French pronunciation.

I didn't actually gamble properly - five Euros a bet is a little steep for my risk appetite. I did put five into one of the slotties which was quite fun for a few minutes even though I failed to win anything. Just watching other people gambling was fun enough for a couple of hours.

Getting the free drinks was the best bit though.

Nice Toilets

Just got back from Nice and Monaco. Probably a few posts needed to cover off the holiday but I'll start with one of my favourite topics, toilets.

I visited quite a lot of bars and toilets over the few days I was in the Cote d'Azore and in general, I didn't think much of the toilets. Many places only had a single, unisex toilet often without toilet paper. Often without toilet seats.

But there were some special toilets too. In The Casino in Monte Carlo (and a few other places) they have special magic toilets with rotating seats. The seats rotate automatically and a thing cleans them:



It's absolutely the strangest thing to watch.

I felt a little wrong filming in a posh toilet (and I'd probably have been thrown out if I'd been filming in the main Casino room) but not wrong enough to not do it.