Nowhere Else to Go
I’m walking through Monte Carlo late one rainy evening. The streets are lined with boutiques and hotels and restaurants, places designed purely to extract money from anyone foolish enough to think they belong here. We duck into a casino—one of those rooms full of desperate people in nice clothes and beautiful women who are definitely not here for the gambling. My friend Jörn moves through it with the ease of someone who actually fits, talking about the bay’s history: pirates, monarchs, casinos, the usual Mediterranean mythology that haunts a place like this.
But that’s not really why we’re here. The real draw is the harbor, where the Monaco Yacht Show has opened again to people wealthy enough to spend on a boat what most people spend on an entire life. It’s a festival of the beautiful and the rich, sailors and salesmen and people who design boats for obscene money. The ticket costs 240 euros. If you can’t afford that, you definitely can’t afford the design furniture for your dream yacht.
The next morning Mercedes-Benz is rolling out their new toy—a 14-meter silver arrow of the seas
called the Arrow460 Granturismo. Price tag around 1.25 million euros. Order now and you get the limited edition. In 2015, when it arrives, you’ll have a designer boat with almost 1000 horsepower and a top speed of 40 knots in calm water.
By afternoon, Antonella and I are burned out on the champagne and the small dogs and the surreal opulence of it all. We make a break for the actual city, thinking we’ll find real people, real life, some version of Monte Carlo that exists outside this machine for extracting money from the wealthy. Instead we find more boutiques, more restaurants, more casinos—which, in hindsight, we should have seen coming.
We end up at a McDonald’s by the harbor. The place is mostly empty. We buy cheap food and sit by the window, watching the water, watching the occasional family or couple pass by. This is probably as close as we’re getting to the actual Monte Carlo, to whatever exists here beyond the boutiques and the yacht shows. An hour later we’re back in the thick of it, drowning in champagne and glitter.
Monte Carlo is a strange machine. The people who run it at night seem barely connected to the actual world, to anything beyond this bubble of money. Wine flows in the restaurants, sushi arrives in silence, laughter echoes off the walls. The women are expensive, the men are generous, the staff knows how to be invisible. You feel the money in every moment—everyone’s money, the city’s money, the money that built this place. You can disappear into it without trying.
The trip ends the way it started: in a helicopter. From the hotel to Nice, then Munich, then Berlin, trading the sun and heat for autumn cold and gray. It doesn’t feel fair. I would have stayed longer, wanted to dig deeper into all of it—the pirates, the monarchs, the whole mythology that makes Monte Carlo seem like something more than what it is. But entry costs more than money. It costs style, willpower, connections, and yeah, ideally a yacht. At least that one you can buy your way into.