J’ai dit, ‘Quoi quoi, dans le cul’

Sandwiched between a week in Barcelona and almost as long in Italy were three days in Nice, with the ever-delightful Gillian. As much as it pains me to say it (so, actually I won’t) I can’t think of a better word to describe the place. Sunny, friendly, French, from my first croissant to our last afternoon sunning ourselves and reading on a pebbled beach on the shores of the Mediterranean, Nice was relaxing. After arriving at our hotel, where I fell madly in love with the receptionist and we found ourselves with an unexpected private room, we made a decision that the only thing we wanted to do other than eat baguettes and lie on the beach was to take the train twenty minutes to Monte Carlo.

This proved slightly more difficult than we had anticipated, as our first night ended up with the two of us drinking warm cider and cheap bubbly on the floor in our room, watching YouTube videos and having Gillian teach me ‘What What in the Butt’ in French (J’ai dit, ‘Quoi quoi, dans le cul’). Suddenly it was too late, and so, upon deciding to postpone until the following night, we set out for a bar. The one we’d aimed for was closed, so somehow we ended up in what was apparently a caricature of a backpackers’ bar. All my mocking of the dreadlocked Australian guy on stage singing Nickelback songs with his guitar disappeared as one of the nearby Canadians started chatting up Gill, who promptly introduced me as her Russian friend Ben. Perhaps something like ‘Dimitri’ would have been more believable (even if my Russian accent was even remotely convincing) but it turned out not to matter—they were either too drunk or too dumb to notice, and so, for the next hour, I was Russian. Fixing a confused look on my face (my Irish friend Mark says it’s my trademark) I nodded and da’d my way through some inane conversation, the best part of which was when the Canadian looked at me, smiled and said to Gill that I probably wasn’t understanding a word he was saying.

But we did make it to Monte Carlo in the end, and sipped on obscenely expensive cocktails beside the casino and opposite the Hotel du Paris. I even smashed what I hope was an expensive ashtray trying to take a photo of Gillian doing sultry. We even forked out the ten Euros to get into the casino, which, while beautiful, was surprisingly small. It was worth the trip, if only to be in Monte Carlo, which feels like a movie set, complete with expensive cars and luxurious facades, and where any minute, it seems that a James Bond villain could land in a zeppelin or a Lamborghini could fly through the air and crash into the side of a building.

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