The Country in the Mountain

Aug. 24 day trip!

Left from an elusive bus station (construction makes everything difficult).  Also, European drivers = crazy.  Most nauseating bus ride of my life.  We quickly accelerated only to slam on the breaks and I swear we narrowly missed hitting people and cars at times.  But we all made it!

We found a map and discovered we’d taken the bus much too far.  The garden we wanted to visit was on the other side of Monaco!  So we walked across the country (in 45 min!) and reached the garden.  Which was full of cacti.

Cacti.

More cacti.  I guess it's exotic for a reason.

So Monaco is literally built into the side of a mountain-- very vertical.  This means gorgeous views, but also frightful navigation.  We ended up splitting up into 2 groups and agreed to meet at a giant tent at 6.  Didn’t happen.  My group left the garden at 5:40pm and arrived at the tent at 6:45pm (just a mite late).  We got lost, which was frustrating at first, but then just turned into liberating exploration.  We took public elevators down to reach sea level and then attempted to find our way to the tent.  The streets didn’t seem to match up with the map, so we were pretty much running around with our bearings as direction.  It was really fun!

This is Monaco.  From the top of the country.

 In the process of finding our way we went past the soccer stadium- where the UEFA Super Cup was being hosted!  We were there a couple days before the game and it was awesome to see all the people and hype.  

This is the stadium.

Soccer hype!

 Bussed back, got crepes for dinner (successful! absolutely delicious) and headed back to pack.  Upon our return we found 2 leaks in our ceiling and some tile busted out!  More ceiling fell during the night.  The receptionist just gave us some towels.  We later found out that the bathroom above us was having some malfunctions.  Lovely.

Our lovely ceiling!