Monaco

August 27th
Monaco

Monaco was just as I remembered it, beautiful scenery, gorgeous weather, and lots of money! But seeing as I’ve visited Monaco a few times and didn’t have any real desire to go exploring, Ben and I decided to catch a train to a city we were even more familiar with, Villefranche. This picturesque seaside town was my first port ever on the Navigator after I joined and certainly one of my favorites, so after a quick round about exploration through the streets of Monaco, Ben and I wandered our way into the train station and purchased tickets. Luckily Ben’s French is fairly decent, letting me relax a little and enjoy the journey. The train station was really nice and after a 20 minute wait we were off. The train ride wasn’t quite as beautiful as I’d hoped, but the moments spent outside the tunnels reminded me of why I enjoy this area of the world so much. Before we knew it we’d arrived at the station in Villefranche and began walking the streets both of us knew relatively well. First stop: internet café. Yeah, maybe that’s slightly anticlimactic after a nice train ride requiring us to spend money to leave the city, but we just both like Villefranche so much and wanted to go there again just to hangout. We sat on our computers for a couple hours doing busy work we can’t get done from the ship only to have to immediately catch our train back into Monaco. We had a nice time though sitting at the café on soft couches, enjoying the vibe and eating a Roquefort sandwich; it was exactly what we were looking for.
We made the train back with no problems and were soon back in Monaco. The train back was really fancy, some what difficult to describe, so I’ll leave it at high tech and fancy (exercising my developed vocabulary). Ben hadn’t been to Monaco before, so as soon as I’d found my bearing again, we decided to take a quick walk up to the casino before rushing back to the ship for a rehearsal. The casino was surrounded with unbelievable cars as always, that and unbelievable tourists doing everything short of climbing on the cars worth more than their lives (pleasant thought). We were quickly running out of time though and left to start our long walk around the harbor to the tender pier. Yeah, we were tendering at the port, always a pain, and always unpredictable. We made it to the pier just as a tender was pulling out, unfortunate timing for two musicians with a rehearsal in 35 minutes. The next tender showed up, we boarded, got delayed by “choppy” seas, and got to rehearsal just barely on time.
The show that night was great. The guy we played for was a comic singer, really funny and a pleasant change from the usual. The first show went well and the second show was surprisingly short. Due to the ship departing from Barcelona we have a large number of Spanish speaking guests onboard, most of whom have been grouped together into a single theater show, meaning a non Spanish speaking entertainer is stuck performing to an audience that can’t understand a word he says. The guest tonight responded to the situation by singing his few songs and getting off the stage, cutting the show 15 minutes short. Maybe not the most exciting story I could have written about…but I was amused, therefore it’s blog worthy.
As a side note that I forgot to mention in the Barcelona post: Gordon moved out after spending 9 months on the ship, wow! Oddly enough, Cunard didn’t have their act together and didn’t have a replacement lined up, meaning his band is without a trumpet player and I’m without a roommate! I’m sure it won’t last too long, but it’s nice having the room totally to myself. I’ll let you know when someone decides to move in. Thanks for reading!