Not lost in translation

Gotta move fast before the internet in my apartment lobby craps out again (it's already broken twice! I'd use the free wifi at the laundromat, which is faster, but I bought the internet here and am stubbornly trying to get my money's worth). Here are two of my journal entries from the last two days. I'm sure all of my posts will be weird and long like this.

--Lauren


13 May 2007

I’m finishing up a long 18-hour day in Juan-les-Pins. I’m thanking my lucky stars that French time is six hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, because I couldn’t make it to the end of the day otherwise!

I barely slept the night before the trip. I wasn’t even obsessing over everything I hadn’t packed or every French phrase I could say but will never need to! I just kept falling asleep and then waking up fifteen or thirty minutes later and having my usual cuckoo dreams.

Packing was painless! (Generally painless at least—I did forget several things near the end, which Mom and Megan has to remind me of in my sleep-deprived state, but we found them all before we left for the airport.) We got to the airport in plenty of time, the international check-in was empty even of tumbleweeds, and I had two hours to sit by myself after a nice ABC lunch with the family to read the packet of reviews for my critical reviewing class!

I met up with Bill (who was actually on my flight) and Mandy, Jonathan, Andy, Tolu, and Chris (Flippo!) at JFK—how convenient that the flight from ATL dropped me off at the exact gate we’d leave from! A raspberry white mocha and lots of candy later, I got to my solo seat closer to the front of the plane than the others, and I surprised myself with how easily I made friends with the lady sitting next to me. She reminded me a lot of my mother and her friends, and we had a great time chatting about her daughter (also a journalism major, who went on to work for the LA Times), her plans for buying either a bichon frisé or a havanese, and our trips to the south of France (she’s staying in Julia Child’s old villa with her two friends and business partners, plotting a route for the culinary tour business they are setting up).

I don’t think it was the coffee, either (excuses, excuses—but I was really tired enough to sleep through the caffeine rush), but I barely slept at all on the flight. Maybe thirty minutes, tops. Even a pretty boring in-flight movie (Music and Lyrics), a surprisingly filling menu of airplane food, and a posh little Delta eye mask couldn’t help me get to sleep. I eventually got over the whole needing to sleep thing when the sun came up on the other side of the plane (1:30 am Georgia time!) and was content to sit, numb with sitting for so long, and stare off.

The Cannes group reassembled pretty quickly after the flight landed, but we had a few delays with cranky old customs lady in one of the two lines and with the unfortunate but probably expected loss of Andy’s luggage after three (four?) connecting flights. The airport is always very peaceful mid-morning on Sunday, so we had little trouble making our leisurely way out to the taxis. After a bit of bad French on my part and a hair-raising ride through the narrow stop-signless streets of Juan-les-Pins, we finally arrived at Couleurs Soleil!

I wish the past day were not the sleep-deprived blur that it is now, but that’s not to say that I haven’t had tons of fun. Allison greeted us with a warm (and thorough!) welcome orientation, and after meeting/waking up my roommate Samantha we gathered some folks together to go get lunch in downtown JLP. We went to an adorable café across from a park, and je me suis amusee bien en entendant aux enfants francaises et en mangeant le plus formidable croque monsieur que je mangerais jamais. I will definitely go back to that place, especially because the waiters were all so nice and the food was so good and cheap!

The rest of the afternoon/evening sprawled into one long attempted shopping trip. We did successfully get Mobicarts (the cashier seemed to appreciate my conducting the transaction in French) so that we can stay in contact with the people in Cannes. We also explored the laundromat, which, before our discovery of 25 euro, month-long internet in the apartment lobby, was our only available means for contacting the outside world. Which really means that we sat in without doing laundry and pirated it.

We took a brief break to get in some sun at the beach with about six of the guys. The beaches are really as crowded as they look in the tourist posters! It seemed like all of Juan-les-Pins was out with its dogs—clean little malteses, goofy-cute French bulldogs, hulking St. Bernards. I need to make myself “Oh, it’s a puppy” in French a bit more, maybe because saying it in English is getting to sound like a broken record. We also had fun watching a group of French types bury a guy in sand and give him sand-boobs; even if they sound hotter, they are still teenaged boys.

The search for dinner brought us back to our odyssey around the small streets and big traffic circles of JLP. We stopped by Casino to get groceries to cook: it was closed. We stopped by Porno Panini man’s shop: he had no bread. (We did get agrum Schweppes there—delicious!!) Every other little pizza/panini restaurant was charging an arm and a leg (and sometimes French insults) for dinner, but eventually we found a little snack bar that made 4 euro paninis. Half of my “pollo” (pronounced like it looks) panini disappeared quickly in my “hanger”, but it was so big that I got to enjoy the rest as a “midnight,” or 10 pm, snack.

I got to sleep early, after buying internet access that didn’t work but so well at night, and I. passed. out. I woke up once or twice in the morning due to some scooter noises (glad to learn that my earplugs could fall out!), but Tylenol PM carried me through to my first early day in JLP.

14 May 2007

I ate my first authentic French breakfast today! Well, technically it was called “le petit-déjeuner italien,” but it consisted of coffee, orange juice, and an apricot croissant and I ordered it all in French at the cute café across from our apartment. I also managed to get a French-English dictionary at a local bookstore and “orange framboise” Tropicana and “la crème laitant de corps” (lotion) at Casino, the local grocery store, after Mandy and I enjoyed our early breakfast and before we went to our first day of “class.”

Class was more of an orientation to Cannes life. Allison gave us some tips on everything from getting our phones to work to how to hop the train out of Juan-les-Pins for free, and I acted upon all that advice today, as I will discuss a bit later. Nate Kohn outlined his critical writing class a little better (yay deadlines!), and Charlie Eidsvik gave us his impression of Cannes before we begin filtering our own into our personal essays for his film class. Apparently Director’s Fortnight will have some of the best films because the selections are made with the director’s guild in mind, and Un Certain Regard screens some unsubtitled but easily infiltrated films in nearby La Bocca. So in all ways I have a bit more direction for the upcoming festival.

We circled by the café again after orientation to get lunch (I had a delicious raspberry tart!), and then by Casino to get more supplies (I had forgotten Nutella and bread!) But eventually we got down to business and went to Cannes for a preview. Oh. My. God. The town is very pretty—you come into the train station after driving beside the sea for a few minutes, and you can spy blue down the alleys between most of the very “French” stucco and wrought-iron buildings. Great shopping is everywhere, cheaper on the more inland streets but all Hermes and Cartier on the main drag, l’Avenue de la Croisette. All of the classy shopping on la Croisette was offset, of course, by tons of advertising for Cannes and its associated films; Bill, the self-professed “kid” in our group, gaped at the Transformers posters, everyone liked the advertisements for Evan Almighty and Ratatouille, and I snapped some pictures of the Focus Features banner (presumably above their section of a fancy hotel).

Glamour and camp collided for us at the Palais, the main theater (for premieres and competition films). The Cannes 60 poster, with a bunch of familiar actors and directors jumping on a trampoline, loomed over the almost-constructed red carpet, and some rockstar supermodel music started pumping right as we walked by. And then we saw the screen for the films on the beach, which stood behind a much more relaxed scene of French boys playing soccer (and flipping us off) and everyone eating ice cream. We all enjoyed watching the two-story carousel on the boardwalk; while we were too cheap to pay the 1 euro per ride, we resolved to get some pictures on it in our dresses and tuxes on a premiere night.

We got back from a very hectic train ride (strange and broken automatic ticket machines!) just in time for our welcome party on the top floor of the apartments. Allison, Nate, and Charlie and his wife provided a great spread of pizza, salad, fruit, and wine, and we all had a good time mingling and learning everyone’s names. The top floor was much cooler than in the morning, thanks to the breeze blowing through the open windows, and the panoramic view of the sun going down over the mountains behind the sea was breathtaking. This is where I’ll be working for the next four weeks?!

My roommate Samantha and I started walking to the beach between a few waves of Georgia kids, and we met up with UNC-grad Geoffrey to stare at dogs, run on top of the hills of imported sand, and tell little French kids what time it was. On our way back up the boardwalk (we were too skittish of hurting our sandaled feet on the rocks to climb across them), Samantha’s Bulldogs sweater found us a new friend—this guy walking down the beach was actually a UGA grad and has two short films in the festival! He reminisced with us about his days in Grady’s old film production program and his film appreciation class with Eidsvik, and we definitely called the dawgs to the horror of all French onlookers for his video blog of the festival. We’re totally going to his screening, and hopefully he’ll get back in touch with Charlie and Nate to talk to our class.

I’ve been winding down this evening, charging up my laptop in the non-existant wifi bubble in the apartment lobby. The night guard is playing some funny French techno radio, and the doors to the courtyard are open and are letting in the great smell of seaside flowers. Earlier I got a strange phone call from some French guy and almost hung up but eventually parsed out that he was going to deliver Ryan and Jill’s lost luggage; that was the most excitement of the past hour, but I’ve had fun in general chatting with the various Cannes program passersby.