NUMBER ELEVEN: Monte Carlo

Monte Carlo is, in general, a fast and loud town.  It is a town full of young, good looking men in business suits and cigarettes driving fast, loud cars. It is a town built for and by handsome, debonaire, wealthy assholes, like Kanye West, only white. It all smells faintly of cigars.  Self-indulgent, egotistical, materialistic, and ostensibly lacking any moral code, Monte Carlo is a cool town; the only problem is it knows that. And that it's a complete fucking cop town. 

Perhaps Monte Carlo feels insecure because of it's reputation, the Las Vegas of Europe, the town the gigantic casino where Ian Flemming based his first James Bond book, Casino Royale. They have cameras stationed on every street, as well as several police officers whose job is to wear that small-town-cop look on their faces all the time. The cop orgy is most dense in front of the palace, the home of Prince Albert, and the raised flag on the roof means that he's in Monte Carlo, probably in his gigantic house, right now.

For the tour of the Palace, they give you these little devices that they tell you to hold up to your ear like a cell phone. This is your tour guide, and not only does it make you look like a douchebag, it takes a full two minutes to tell you the rules. This is currently the home of Monaco's princes, so please refrain from taking pictures and videos in the palace walls, it says. Yes, that would be weird if a bunch of people stampeded through your house every day taking pictures, but it would be weird to live in that house in the first place. Get over it. It's not like Albert even goes into the one wing of the house they let tourists see anyway: he lives in the other wings and ignores the public one completely.

This is not how my palace would be run. I had a lot of time to think about how I would do it if I was Grace Kelly's daughter and lived in the Monacan palace, since I abandoned the little tour guide. It was too much for me, too much of an obvious ploy to keep everyone quiet and simultaneously save money and time on live tour guides. But all that you can hear in the place is the occasional conversation, held usually in another language and among children, footsteps on marble floor, and the hum of someone else's pocket tour guide. 

Here's an average morning in the palace as I rule it:

I am woken up in the morning by the sound of tourists talking in a language I don't understand. Initially, this pisses me off, because I have a headache, but then sets a wave of panic over me as I realize that I am naked underneath the sheets of the four poster in La Chambre Louis XIII. I grab the sheets, green as the wallpaper, and stumble through the banisters separating the alcove from the main room and parade through the already knocked-over separators that they use at airports to form lines. Past the early birds I would fly, through the large, red Salon Trône and into the courtyard, across the stage and chairs set up there, and up into the wings where I am supposed to live so I can sleep until I can get inappropriately drunk again. Fuck you, I'm the princess! I RUN this shit!