Monaco

Monaco felt less like a country and more like a stage set — everything too polished, too deliberate, too expensive to be entirely real. I came in from Nice on a warm morning and within ten minutes I was standing in front of the Casino de Monte-Carlo with Bentleys and Ferraris parked along the kerb like it was completely normal. The ornate Belle Époque facade glowed in the flat midday light, and the silver sphere sculpture on the lawn caught the sun at an angle that made it look almost smug.

What got me more than the money was the geography. This whole principality is squeezed onto a cliff. I found a terrace above Fontvieille harbour where the Monaco Rock just sat there — the Palace up top, terracotta rooftops stepping down to the water, yachts moored in neat rows below. From Kathmandu I'm used to looking at things from a height, but this was different: the Mediterranean behind it all, that particular shade of deep blue that doesn't look real in photos but absolutely is.

The streets away from the Casino surprised me — quiet, almost empty, residential towers rising straight up from narrow roads. Le Simona building stopped me cold, that perforated concrete cylinder next to a slab of latticed facade. I had an espresso somewhere nearby and sat with it for a while. Monaco is tiny enough that you can feel like you've understood it in a day, but I kept finding corners that felt genuinely odd and specific, like nothing else on the Riviera.