SHOW ME THE MONEY!

THREE DAYS AGO, feeling a bit isolated, I phoned Dawn and asked where she was and what she was doing. 

"I'm in France, near Nice, on the Cote de Azure," she said, "I'm checking out some villas to rent. I'm swimming topless,  I'm lying on a cobbled beach. I have an apartment overlooking the bay of Ville Franche, and I can see Cap Ferrat from the balcony.  Why don't you come for the weekend?"

Morning breaks on Cap du Ferrat

Hmm. Verbs and Venice, or Dawn and Decadence in the playground of the kingly rich and famous?  In ten minutes flat I'd booked my ticket to join her. I packed a tiny case, some white linen clothes, a straw basket and a hat, caught the traghetto and the Alilaguna across the water, boarded a small plane and in an hour and a half I too, after being driven in a gleaming Mercedes taxi to our meeting place, very unlike the rattletrap Mercedes taxis in Morocco, was in the playground of the kings and the rich and famous, and an unnamed number of African despots with other people's money to burn.

Billion dollar babies

In twenty four hours, we have seen enough money to float every embattled country ten times. A cluster of mini ocean liners moor in the Mediterranean outside the apartment; this morning a giant cruise liner slid into the bay, depositing it's bounty of humans onto pampered shores. I've walked topless on a French beach, balked at walking on slimy stones to have a swim between millions of seaworthy floating euros that masquerade as weekend accommodation,  (but I will, I promise, by the time I leave on Sunday) and walked for hours through the tiny stone villages where magnificent giant villas totter on cliff tops. I've done some financial damage in Darjeeling, the gorgeous French lingerie shop in Nice. Goodbye Target, forever!! Panties and bras look divine and feel even better: let the straps show and the buttons pop - I've paid enough for these undies!  Watch out, pedestrians under my Venetian window: I have more visual ammunition.

Outside Hotel Cap Grande, because we'll never go in!

I'm thrilled to have more to eat than pasta, grilled sardines or pizza. Still getting around Italian, I was flung straight into poo poo French; Dawn, translating.  I found a Moroccan restaurant where we feasted on chicken tagine, beetroot salad, couscous and grilled meat on skewers, with much left over for a doggie bag to take home.  I slept long and deep in a very comfortable bed, and this morning we walked about 6kms to Hotel Cap Grand, winding along roads with arguably the most expensive villas in the world, and the most beautiful.  Gardens as large as botanical extravaganzas, topiaried hedges, full time gardeners pruning and nipping and sweeping and shearing, bent under straw hats. This part of the world reminds me very much of Cape Town; swooping mountains, gorgeous homes on huge blocks plunging to the sea: the hotel had it's own funicular to the pool.

Pool at Hotel Cap Grande ...

With just an hour before our scheduled lunch in Monaco at one of it's swankiest restaurants, and a 6km walk back to the apartment, Dawn hitched us a ride with a young Italian plumber in his ute, sitting on pipes and tubes.  A quick change to dress the part, and then a bus, to Monaco, to the Metropole Hotel.  Waiting for the bus we talked to Rafael, a beautiful young man from Brazil, whose friend is the main artist for the palace, doing portraits and sculptures.  And the Metropole Hotel? Holy Mother of the Euro, what a grand magnificent edifice to all things ostentatious in the most discreet of ways!  Chandeliers as large as cars that glitter like swimming pools, embossed fabrics, antique chairs, every scrape and drag muted by dense carpets and wall hangings.  Fountains gurgling from fonts in the walls, giant flower arrangements and fawning employees wearing couture clothing - black, of course.

Outside Metropole, after lunch

And the lunch?  Almost an hour late, hot, sweaty and a bit rumpled, we were ushered to our reserved spot at Joel Robuchon's famous restaurant, and seated at a small table at the edge of the dining room, overlooking the terrace and its giant urns of cyclamen.  Rich brocade table cloth to the ground, and a padded stool for my handbag.  Six glasses. Pretty woman meets Thelma and Louise!

Would you like some French Champagne madam? Oui!  First you get a leetle tast, because you mus no that you are dreenking perfection. So many bubbles vu sink vu dreenking shampu, eh?   I pour you a leetle glass of Domaine e Chateau-Gaillard, so ubbly ess like inhaling parfum? Ah, madam, vu vant another taste sample?  Voila, nobody look,  ear youar.   So madams, here is menu: vot? Vu want el cheapo set menu? Madams, looking arounds, have more champahgna.  Putting on most disgusted face look.

Two mini tasting glasses of cucumber and mint soup arrive, and a glass bowl of paper thin toasts and olive oil.

I sip the champagne.  It floats away on my tongue.  I order smoked salmon, and a pepper steak beef.  Dawn orders monk fish and a sampling of the sweet trolley. The champagne tastes like someone has sprinkled fairy dust on my tongue. The salmon is sliced as thin as peeling sunburn; drizzled with oil, lemon, salt, pepper and dill.  It dissolves in my mouth, chased by black rye bread and a sour cream sauce. The butter tastes as if it has been whipped with fresh air, salt and olives. The meat is purple, crusty on the top, so soft I could cut it with a toothpick.  It arrives alone on a plate, like an offering.  In a tiny bowl are tiny potatoes sprinkled with parsley.  That's it.  Gone are the garnishes and condiments and salads and other taste detractors.  Dawn says her fish is the best fish she's ever tasted.  The meat dissolved in my mouth.

Salon at Metropole

More champagne, madams?  Hmm... probably not, I'm seeing shampoo bubbles behind my ears. We take photos with my iphone, laugh like mad, drop our napkins, eat the breads with butter, and the garnishes with our fingers, and have to restrain ourselves from scooping our fingers in the glasses to get the remnants of the cucumber soup.  The waiters are first aghast, then turn discretely away. Other diners wonder at our carryings-on and laughter, but we're having a far better time than they are. I finish with a few figs and Dawn gets her helpings from the sweet trolley. Gorgeous, wonderful, incredible perfect meal ... we're not stuffed full, the meal is balanced.

The bill arrives. With two complimentary chocolates, to sweeten the shock.   We're not supposed to study it: we're just supposed to pay.  25E for a glass of champagne? And I gave Dawn a sip! Was I mad!  We're both acting terribly blonde because the champagne has dissolved any notion of rationality but manage to calculate that each bubble would have cost 50c - enough for traghetto across the Grand Canal!   But who cares!  We've just had the best meal, in the Michelin two star recently voted Best Hotel in the World. It's only money, we laugh as we fling down the Amex: we'll eat snails tonight.  The waiters turn away discretely, cardiac arrest apparatus hidden under the tables.  What champagne! What a meal!  What a setting!  What a bill!

We steal a roll of toilet paper from the restroom in the best hotel in the world.  Just because we can.

Moi, pretentious? Just for a day ...

We walk down and around and through Monaco, as car models we've never seen before swoosh past, driven by handsome young men who are probably the chauffeurs.   The shops are excesses of every level; god forbid there should ever be a sale here.  The place heaves with money:  with idle rich not having anything else to do.  Drunk with the incredible lunch and that we were able to do it ... we wonder if we'd like to live like this.  Everything we've enjoyed is because it's out of our normal frame of reference. We like the thrill of the chase of a great pair of shoes on sale, or the delight of swimming in a secluded cove.  And that occasionally, yes we can enjoy a meal in one of the world's top restaurants.

Gorgeous Belle Epoque architecture

But we quickly tire of this conspicious excess - after watching a young girl in her teens, dressed in a red catsuit, and attending to her two chihuahuas in diamond collars yapping at her feet, being given two 500E notes from the bulging wallet of her bodyguard, who then sent her off to do more shopping, pampered, diamond studded pooches in tow.

We left Monaco and it's frightening wealth, looking at the Prince Albert and his new, reluctant South African bride who apparently tried to escape what she was marrying into.  We took the 1E (return) traghetto across the harbour, between the apartment building sized yachts with enough solar gps systems to guide a star across the solar system, and we waited for a bus for an hour, jostling amongst hordes of tourists. Back home, we put our feet up, enjoyed the view, cooked the doggy bag of left over couscous from last night's Moroccan meal and roasted a leetle poulet to go with the petit pois in the fridge.

On Sunday, we walked all day, up steep lanes past crumbling villas just waiting for someone like me to come and renovate it;  into the local equivalent of two dollar shop filled with gorgeous lotions and potions, into the supermarket where I fondled the labels of French wines, sniffed the chocolates and bought some French biscuits, and fossicked in the local market where I bought a bunch of fresh artichokes for dinner.

Wanting to continue the gastronomic ex/successes of the past 24 hours, we lunched at a place on a bend in the road adjacent to the marina where billions of dollars of water toys nudged each other as billions of dollars of Ferraris, Porsche, Bentleys, Rolls and Lexus, never mind the lesser cars like Audis, Peugeots and vintage Jags, squealed by.  Dawn chose lamb, I chose duck:  both were the worst meal either of us had in years. Both floated in globs of fat, cream and oil and I hadn't even moved the wobbling pieces to the side of the plate before my stomach started burbling miserably.

Villa Kerylos

We walked a long way to the Villa Kerylos, a magnificent recreation of an ancient Greek villa, down to the last detail with marble from Siena and Sicily, painted friezes, magnificent mosaics.

And sensational taps!

A sensational place, sensational views. Alas, if the restaurant we lunched in wants my feedback, they'll find it here.

From there we walked and walked and walked and walked up and down and walked sideways to the villa built by Ephrussi de Rothschild...

constructed between 1905 and 1912 at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera by Baroness Béatrice de Rothschild (1864–1934) in the Goût Rothschild. It was designed by the Belgian architect Aaron Messiah. A member of the prominent Rothschild banking family and the wife of the wealthy Russian-Jewish banker Baron de Ephrussi, Béatrice de Rothschild built her rose-colored villa on a promontory on the isthmus of Cap Ferrat overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. 

Villa Kerylos

The Baroness filled the mansion with antique furniture, Old Master paintings, sculptures, objets d'art, and assembled an extensive collection of rare porcelain. The gardens are classified by the French Ministry of Culture as one of the Notable Gardens of France.  (Thanks wikipaedia). 

Moi, with new Venetian haircut

Looking around at the astonishing wealth, yes we were a leetle jealous.  Yes we were a lot gobsmacked. Yes, we'd like to have all that. A villa or two, and enough money for whatever we vanted.

And we did, just for a day, and that was enough.  Enough to enjoy  a memory of a fabulous meal with a great friend in an amazing place, without having it buried under a thousand other fabulous meals with forgotten friends, where presentation and place were all, and circumstances and friendship took second place.

Self portraits at Rothchild Villa

I had my swim in the Cote d'Azur this morning, brief as it was, (very brief, I was topless because I could) because I don't like fishies and seaweed nibbling my toes or lumpy stones beneath my feet.  We went back to Nice on the local bus. I said Merci, Merci, Au Revoir, baci baci baci, I shall see you next when we go on our cruise to Vanuatu in two weeks.

My vaporetto stop.  Notice Rialto bridge.

I caught the small plane back to Marco Polo, and the vaporetto to San Angelo, and the traghetto to San Toma, and my feet did the rest to casa mia.

Aaaah.   Bellissimo.  It is very good to be home. I love Italy.