“Bonjour Adrienne!”

Our time in the South of France is reluctantly coming to a close. We are heading to the train station in a little while to make the trip into Italy.
The night before last we went out for a couple drinks and then decided to head home so that we could get an early start on heading to Monaco the next day. When we made it back to our hotel we started flipping through the 8 channels on our TV, which seemed a bit pointless since the only channel in English was CNN Europe. But, we happened across Rocky dubbed in French. Let me tell you, you have not lived until you have heard Rocky referred to as “Monsieur Balboa”. It was totally hilarious to hear a French translator attempt to capture an Italian-American meathead dialect… and I probably should have just had a laugh about it and moved on… But as Jon started to drift off to sleep, I became obsessed with how they were going to translate the quintessential line from Rocky, “Yo Adrienne!”… Would he say “Bonjour Adrienne!”?… “Excuse Moi Adrienne!”? It played on my mind and I couldn’t avert my eyes… I watched the entire Rocky movie in French and in the end when the line was finally uttered, they removed the first word altogether and he merely exclaimed “Adrienne!”… I guess there’s just no way to translate some words…

Monaco was really nice! But it was sooooo richy rich. There were Ferraris and Lamborginis and Bentleys everywhere… And the marina was exclusively filled with yachts of varying sizes and stature. There were no fishing dingys in this port, that’s for sure.

Jon and I had an agenda though- we each budgeted $100 Euro to spend in the casino, in the hopes that we would walk out with much more. After blazing through $20 Euro each on the slot machines we moved on to Roulette (which I have found out definitively is pronounced Roo-Lae and I’m not a total idiot for calling it that all along…). The Roulette table were soooo confusing! Everyone has the same colored chip, the difference in colors only accounts for the different denominations being bet, not who is doing the betting. There were three workers at the table watching who placed what and moving bets around with these long sticks when beckoned by the patrons. I thought my brain was going to explode trying to keep track in my head of all the numbers I had bet on during each turn. Finally I took out my notepad and started writing them down… It was seriously just me and this elderly man who had our notepads out. It was a little demoralizing. I couldn’t believe it- it’s totally different than Vegas! High rollers were buying in with stacks of $500 Euro bills and then tossing their $100 Euro (there is no Euro sign on this keyboard) chips onto the table willy-nilly from 10 feet away and just calling out to one of the workers as to where they wanted the chips placed.

I was sucking pretty bad, but I was able to pull it out a few times when the chips were literally down (I had one left when I hit and won 40 Euros and stayed in it). Jon was hot though! He hit straight up on the 17 on the first spin! (The chip minimum on each chip was 5 Euro). We ended up playing for a few hours and came out of there dead even, which is about all you could hope for. (Well, I was hoping for way more but I wasn’t sad to come out of there with as much as I went in with…).

Since we ended up with more money than we were expecting, we decided to splurge and have a bottle of champagne at a marina cafe. It was so weird eavesdropping on the Americans/British/Irish people seated at the tables in front and behind us. They were talking about the million Euro homes they had purchased, and taking trips on their yachts. It was bizarre to have this window into a totally different world.

All in all, it was a very fun afternoon!

Next Stop: Cinque Terre, Italy