I've no idea what a principality is.
My guess is that it's basically a bit of a country (in this case France) that's effectively been leased for free to someone. I'm thinking it's a bit like the Hong Kong thing where we won it off the Chinese but had this weird leasehold agreement where after 100 years (or whatever it was) we gave it back to them.
Anyway, whatever it is, it's tiny. You can easily walk from one end to the other in a few hours. Or at least you can if you don't mind walking up very steep hills.
Monaco is a harbour town and it's basically surrounded by cliffs so the whole place is on a huge slant and is incredibly steep. I'm basically talking 45 degree angles here - this is proper steep.
This probably represents my biggest surprise about Monaco - just how steep it is. There's a part on the circuit, just after the start, where they go up a hill towards Casino Square. I'd always known this was a hill, but on the first day, sat in the stands and seeing it I was stunned at just how steep it is, and how long too. It's quite the climb.
Monaco is slightly odd (well, it's a lot odd, actually) in terms of the weekend. Normally a Grand Prix weekend lasts 3 days - Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
On Friday you have F1 practice sessions. On Saturday you have another F1 practice and then the qualifying. On Sunday you have the F1 race.
In addition to this you have all sorts of support races. For example, you have GP2 (the feeder formula for F1) and Formula Renault. But you also have Porsche racing. These other races also have various practice and qualifying sessions too.
Depending on the circuit you'll also have other entertainment stuff too, like fly-bys or special drag races or whatever.
Anyway, at Monaco it's different - they also have Thursday. Now the traditional reason for this was that Friday always used to be a Bank Holiday. But now it isn't; however they haven't recompressed the race - it's still across 4 days.
This unfortunately means the events are more spread out. Where you might have 5 things on each of the 3 days day everywhere else, instead you get 4 things on 4 days at Monaco if you see what I mean.
Anyway, the point is that we only watched on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, which are the Formula 1 days. Friday had racing, but didn't have any F1 stuff, so we did other stuff then (I'll blog on that later).
On each day we sat in a different place. You'll need to have a look at the circuit on wikipedia to understand where.
Basically on Thursday we in the first part of the harbour, between Tabac (so named because there's an underground Tabac - a shop that sells cigarettes - on the corner) and Louis Chiron (who I believe is a Monaco Racing Driver from the old days). What the ticket allowed us to do was sit in any of the seats in the stands between these two corners, which was kinda cool.
I was amazed at how close you are to the drivers. Monaco is a street circuit and if you imagine a normal road, where the pavement is is where the stands start. I reckon in some of the stands if you'd have gone down the front you could have tapped the driver on the head as they drove past (except there's obviously a fence in the way!).
The closeness means it's bloody loud too. One of the things people are always amazed at is just how loud F1 cars are. The thing I compare them to is a loud fog-horn, but continuous rather than a burst - you have to shout right into someone's ear so they can hear you over the noise. If you then imagine that noise rattling around streets and also being close (most proper circuits have runoff areas and gravel traps so you're some way away) you can start to imagine how loud it is.
I got some good photos there, including a sighting of David Coulthard and Martin Brundle - both ex-drivers who do commentary/coverage for the BBC.
Another amazing thing about the harbour is how big some of these yachts are - they're like cruise liners, but are privately owned. There were millions and millions of pounds worth of yacht there.
But what's more, some of the smaller ones are parked up right at the edge of the circuit - the harbour is right next to the road they drive on. So there were people sat in the yachts, watching the race.
Also, in one of the lulls some page 3 type models came out of one of the yachts and started taking photos of each other. I couldn't really see from where we were, but they appeared to be wearing bikinis, although they certainly still got a reaction from the stands with people blowing those horns and cheering at them.
Saturday we were at Casino square. Of the three days this was probably the best in terms of the placing and the general atmosphere.
It was a single stand and it was the most comfortable seating, both in terms of what it was (moulded plastic seats that fit your bottom comfortably) and the space you had. You also got a really good view of the cars as they belted around Massenet and into casino square.
The casino is also right there on the other side of the track. In front of it was a large terrace type thing with a restaurant with a lot of people watching. Down the sides were some shops - that's another thing about Monaco.
If you want to watch the race you have two options. You need to be in a stand or you need to get onto a roof of one of these shops or in the rooms. You can't just go and stand and watch like you can at every other Grand Prix.
Well I say that - there is a place you can do that, called "the Rock". This has nothing to do with the wrestler and is literally a big rock where people stand and watch. But it's not some gentle slope - it's almost vertical. But on Sunday you would not believe how packed it was up there - I got some pictures.
Casino is close to where Lewis Hamilton spanked the barrier on Saturday and he walked right through the casino and I got a few pics. He kept his helmet on which was the first clear indication it was entirely driver error.
Casino was very civilised too - out the back was a little ark think where we could go when there was no track action and have a lie down. It was where we had lunch too and it was where we had another bit of a surprise.
We were all expecting that the cost of food and drinks and merchandise would be horrendous, but they weren't. Well, they were - but no more horrendous than at any other Grand Prix. We'd assumed that with the captive market and being where it was it would be doubly ridiculous, back actually they were about what you'd expect to pay at the British Grand Prix.
Anyway, on Sunday we were at Piscine (or swimming pool - and so named because there is an actual swimming pool there. It's a smallish one, but, rather incongruously, it had a water flume.). The stand actually faced along the track away from the swimming pool.
This was a bit of an odd position to be in. Form a track point of view you mainly see the back of the cars. There's a tricky chicane there that the Ferraris seemed rather intent on cutting all the time, but even then they're not really side on to you.
However, what you gain is a decent view of the pits (Monaco is odd in that the pit garages actually face away from the Start/Finish straight). This was something of a revelation. When you see them in the pits on TV it seems smooth and flowing and thoroughly well organised.
Seeing them in real life was like watching barely organised chaos - it's a massive flurry of activity and has much more of a feeling of impending, narrowly avoided disaster.
This is also where Kovalainen had his crash, which was rather stunning. I've seen crashes before of course having been to the British Grand Prix, but it was amazing to be so close to it.
When Kovalainen got out of the car he was clearly quite dazed. As I said from there you're right behind the pits and he seemed determined to run across to them, despite having to run across the circuit on what is effectively a blind corner. Also, the pits are actually slightly elevated, so how he thought he was going to climb over I don't know!
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