Back in action! [!OT]

[melfice]

Any photograph of that? or even 3D reconstructions?

[mrwiseman]

After 2 weeks I finally completed my vacation report, I'm going to post it after this post.

I'll be uploading some pics of the trip soon.

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ April 18, 2003 07:43 PM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]</font>

[mrwiseman]

VACATION REPORT
===============

1. INTRODUCTION

On Friday 4th in the morning I started my short vacations which ended yesterday, Monday 7th in the evening. I spent about one day in each of these cities: Monaco (Monaco), Nice (France) and San Remo (Italy), three coast cities in the north-west part of the Mediterranean sea. My HQ was in Nice, the Grand Hotel Aston (****). I spent half of the friday, saturday morning, and half of the monday in Nice; half of Saturday in San Remo; and all of the sunday in Monaco.

Nice is nice. Even though the beach sucks, the city is pretty good, it's full of great buildings and abundant vegetation. We weren't going to Nice for the beach anyways, we are more interested in the city itself.

Monaco is great as well, and it's as luxurious and glamourous as you may think, but it's nothing you don't have in cities like Madrid or Barcelona. Like any great European city, it's worth a visit, and doing the famous F1 circuit by bus and entering the world famous Casino de Monaco is really something.

San Remo is disappointing though, and I don't recommend it. Fortunately, we didn'txend much time there.


2. NICE

As I said, this city honors its name. The main reason lies in the abundance of vegetation, especially flowers. Not in vain that region of France is the world's first producer of flowers. Near the coast, Nice city is full of carefully created and maintained gardens. More into the city, you can see excellent traditional European buildings. The beach is no good - rocks and no infrastructures, but you're not intended to bathe anyways. Instead of bathing, you could go to the nearby mountains, which are really close to the sea, making a nice landscape. I think France's Blue Coast is overrated, but Nice is definitely worth a visit.

On every day except the Monday, you have the famous traditional flower market, a place where you can buy all kinds of flowers and products that use flowers (like soap), all of them 100% hand-made. This is really something.

Finally, I feel I should talk about the Russian church. There are some good catholic churches in the city, but this Russian orthodox church surely beats them. It's huge and nice, and it looks like Grandia II graphics, full of curves, color and art.


3. MONACO

Monaco was impressive and interesting, like its story. A very small country that was once taken by the church, and retaken by the Prince, who entered the city disguised as a monk and prepared a rebel force. Years later it was prosperous as a Spainish Protectorate. Then the Grimaldi (Royal family of Monaco) made a stupid mistake by signing a pact with France to get rid of Spain. After Spain abandoned Monaco, France made fun of the Grimaldi and took over area after area of Monaco, gradually reducing its size to what it's now (served them right for rejecting our services). Centuries passed, and now Monaco has good relations with both France and Spain (especially the first), but it's entirely dependant on France.

Enough with History. Monaco is a great place to visit. It's a medium-sized city built on the side of a mountain, with a small seaport and an heliport (the best way to get there is by bus, though). Its low taxes make it a fiscal paradise where lots of sportsmen/women and millionaires "reside" to elude the much higher taxes of any big country. Since the average citizen is rich, Monaco is a very special city. Everything is really expensive, and a small flat of medium-quality construction costs more than 1 million dollars (remember you want it to avoid taxes, not to live in it). I said outside glamour Monaco has nothing cities like Madrid or Paris don't have, but the glamour itself makes it a curious place to visit to say the least.

I lost the count of the Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis, etc. I saw in the streets. Many of them were parked in front of the world famous Casino, which looks like a palace both outside and inside.

As you may know, Monaco is itself a F1 circuit. Once a year a Formula 1 race is held at Monaco. There's a lot about F1 here and there, and a nice Mika H?kkinen's McLaren monument. I'm surprised they made a statue for him and not for the extremely overhyped bulldozer driver most F1 fanboys worship as if he were the best (yes, I'm talking about Michael Schumacher [img]smile.gif[/img] ).

But favorite part of Monaco was undoubtly the Japanese garden, which made me feel like playing Shenmue. I've taken about 68 pics of the Japanese garden alone, I liked it that much. I'll be posting some of them in a further update.


4. SAN REMO

San Remo was disappointing. The beach is unusable, as in Nice, but it doesn't have anything to see outside the traditional amateur touring car race, a small orthodox church and a couple old buildings. The old town is really bad - I never saw a city this poor in Spain. So my advice is: if you visit Italy, don't waste your time in San Remo, there are hundreds of better places to see there, like Rome, Milano, Florence, etc. (We visited San Remo only because it's so near of Nice.)


5. GENERAL COMMENTS

I should've called this section "rant"; all the bad/funny things go here.

Prices all over France and Monaco are HIGH. By high I mean twice as much as in Spain in average. Besides, services there aren't what I'm used to being Spanish. I mean waiters, shop assistants, etc. usually aren't as nice as they are in Spain, and/or they'll want tips even for saying "hi". The **** hotel we were in was nice, but I saw *** hotels in Spain that are just as good and charge one fourth of what this one does, and this is not a coincidence - other people told me about a *** hotel in France being like a ** hotel in Spain but costing like a **** one. Trains aren't as good either. Taxis are good but you feel like you're in some TV jokes program when they want to charge you 5 ? for what you would do in a 5-10 minutes walk. Oh and I'll coment on the driving later.

Europeans except the Spanish are crazy. Or I should say the Spanish are, because everyone else wakes up, has lunch, dinner and goes to sleep hours before us. We had trouble when we wanted to eat at just one hour before our normal time in Spain... and when we went to some places by these times, half of the people having lunch/dinner by that time were Spanish tourists like us ^_^. Seriously, on weekends we usually wake up/have lunch/have dinner/go to sleep at 10:00/15:30/22:30/2:00 in Spain (and I usually go to bed and wake up later), but it's more like 8:00/12:30/20:00/22:30 in most of Europe... The worst thing about this that happened to us was in Monaco: we had dinner at only 21:30 and then we wanted to take the bus back to Nice, but we found that the last bus of the day had departed more than an hour ago (I think this is lame compared to regular buses till like 0:00 and then an hourly bus from 1:00 to 6:00 in Madrid). We had to take a train, and while we walked to the station, the city seemed like a ghost town and even bars were closed at 21:30 Saturday night...

Finally, I though we drive like crazy until now. People in these places don't give a damn about rules, they believe they are some kind of F1 driver and I can say have experienced the very Crazy Taxi feeling (!). In particular, a taxi we took one night drove at 70 Km/h inside Nice, oversteering and all, no kidding! (!). Damn, I was really scared, I wanted to kiss the floor like the Pope does when we arrived.


6. RATINGS

I'm going to rate different aspects of the cities with a 1..5 scale, compared to the standard Spanish place. I'll be judging them against my own country, but I'll try to be as fair as I can.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=2 face="Verdana,Tahoma">code:</font><table border="0" width="90%" bgcolor="#333333" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0"><tr><td width="100%"><table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" bgcolor="#FF9900"><tr><td width="100%" bgcolor="#E0E0E0"><pre>
Spanish avg. Nice San Remo Monaco
Things to see 5 4.5 3 5
Bldngs/Castl/Palac 5 4.5 1.5 4.5
Historic value 5 4 1.5 2.5
Artistic value 3 4.5 1.5 4.5
Other value 4.5 3 3 4.5

Beach 5 1.5 1.5 ?
Hotels 4.5 3 ? 5
Infrastructures 4 4 3.5 5
Transports 5 3 3 2.5
People/Attention 5 4 3.5 3
"Glamour" 3 4 1 5
</pre></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></BLOCKQUOTE>


7. CLOSING

I enjoyed my trip very much, and I definitely recommend you to visit Monaco and Nice if you get the chance. With the amount of things worth seeing they have, you can't regret it. Don't go there expecting to have a relaxed beach day, for that, go to Spain instead. And if you like great, History-rich cities with lots of amazing buildings and jaw-dropping art, try Madrid, Paris, London, Rome, Prague, Barcelona, Berlin and many other European cities as well.