Back in Cannes

It wasn't too hard for me to get back into life in the suburbs. I hadn't felt homesick whatsoever in France (despite some pangs reminding me of eating guacamole and watching movies in the basement with my family, I was too busy enjoying myself), but suddenly sleeping in my bed, waking up (early, even!) to make my own espresso and toast, and walking the dog were all thrilling.

I commute to Atlanta three times a week to intern at The Atlantan, a luxury lifestyle magazine. It's pretty fun to get all dolled up and listen to hip hop on my drive into Buckhead, and everyone at the office is really nice. Three other college girls are interning there too--we have a cute cluster of cubicles near the "kitchen" (read: free gummi bears) and Sarah C's desk and its illustrious "beauty box" (free samples of Shiseido and some super expensive sunscreen! holy cow!)--and all the editors prank on each other over lunch. Some highlights: playing chicken in the parking lot of Taqueria del Sol (and pissing off a slow-driving old lady) on Friday and looking into an editorial meeting with the Sarahs, Danny, and Travis on Monday. I'm still a bit awkward around the office, and I still don't know if this is the right thing for me, but it's so nice to be working out the kinks with such an inviting group of people.

I've had a few princess and the pauper moments with my second job as a rental clerk back at dear old Hollywood Video. I'm the only intern to have/need another job, and a pretty low-class one at that, but going to work three minutes away from my house is even cooler than it used to be compared to my hour-long commute to north Atlanta! I've rented five movies over two shifts; I've always been a nut about my free rental perks, but after getting to see free movie after free movie at Cannes I've had quite a void to fill.

Tonight, Mom and I watched Barton Fink, the Coen brothers' film that won the Palme d'Or in 1991. I was instantly amazed at how quickly the "Cannes feeling" came back watching this old awardee--I could see myself sitting in the pink armchairs of the Palais (albeit with bigger hair and more sequins), listening to the weird Beauty and the Beast intro music, feeling like the movie is too long and challenging even though it's in my own language for once. I'm not sure what to make of Barton Fink and have postponed looking at other reviews as long as possible to try to work it out on my own. I keep going back to good acting and great cinematography (hearing the waves whenever Barton looked at the picture of the beach put me in his mind, and probably made me feel a bit crazy for all of it), but when I can barely make heads or tails of what really happened or what didn't I have to think: Is it futile? Is it one of those filmic "fuck you"s that Cannes is famous for, a la Wild at Heart or All That Jazz? In the end, is the film so shallow, so intentionally convoluted and pointless plot-wise, that you're supposed to think it's deep? For all that I want to hate it or refuse to dignify it with any further mention, I did enjoy watching it. I think Cannes has either made me really tolerant or really obsessive.

Last days

June 6-8

Apparently tequila shots night in JLP went off without a hitch. Most of my friends told me stories about falling down while dancing—later they showed me the sites of these incidents when we walked past the scene of the crime—but there was no real story to tell when Allison cancelled class. We just hit the ground running toward Nice for round two of climbing the rock castle and eating ice cream at 96 Flavors. Kaison and Mandy were patient while I got the best deal in France on my mother’s birthday present (she taught me to be a good bargain shopper), and we took a ton of pictures, stood for a long time in front of the waterfall’s mist, and helped some fellow Americans find the best flavors at the ice cream shop (I got Grand Marnier! I love that stuff!)

Was this the night we found the McDonalds in Golfe Juan? Kaison and Tolu and I were walking the beach and saw a “McDonald’s this way” sign, and since I hadn’t lead anyone wrong on the trip thus far we decided to go on a Happy Meal quest. We almost gave up twice, but after one false alarm we did see the red and gold flags and ran screaming through a few intersections to get to the fancy McDonalds not 3 but 25 minutes out of our way. As soon as we stepped back outside with my small Coke and fries it started raining, so we high-tailed it back to gloat about our fast food victory/warn everyone against ever following a McDonalds sign in France again.

Thursday was a fun/weird/emotional last day of class. We finished up a few reviews, including mine on An Old Mistress, but then we got into experience papers. It was such a strange moment, hearing about some of my experiences from another person’s point of view. I was glad to know that we were thinking some of the same things, but when someone would get to a detail that I completely missed I was grateful that my already wonderful memories got that much richer. After we finished up, Allison read her experience paper from her first trip to France with Nate’s family on the old Avignon study abroad—too weird to hear about her meeting Paul Cox for the first time when we had just met him two weeks ago. She also shared a really remarkable essay she wrote in response to an outline question on a sociology final. She hit the nail on the head when she talked afterwards about feeling inadequate, but witnessing someone else take what they love to such a perfected extent energized me to keep doing what I do.

Several of us went into Cannes for one last time to have some company/not get too emotional before the farewell dinner at 8. We hit FNAC (where I whipped out some mad French to ask where the Italian rap was), the banini stand (where Tolu and I danced with the cashier to that Nelly Furtado/Timbaland/Justin Timberlake song that’s so cool), the Palais (for some sad, faux-mopey pictures), and Monoprix. I didn’t feel at all sad about seeing Cannes sans festival or about seeing the town for my last time on the trip—it was too fun to go back and keep laughing with my friends.

The farewell dinner was spectacular. I was one of the first students to go up to the solarium, and all of us gasped at the view and wondered why we never took all the windows down before. Out on the roof a long, purple-clothed table covered in bread and wine had room for all of us to sit surrounded by friends, and I soon situated myself between some of my favorite people with a plate full of chicken, mini-quiches, and fruit salad (real food!). Reverting back to my typical self I was pretty quiet (hopefully not awkwardly so), enjoying listening to several different conversations and taking in the rooftop scene. Eventually we all got a bit more animated as everyone was taking party pictures and making so much noise one of the residents below us asked us to get off the roof (!). I chatted with Anna Eidsvik and a few others as we moseyed out—will definitely miss her as a movie buddy!—and then most of the students went their ways for the last night of partying. About a dozen of the students and I couldn’t get out on the “4L Challenge” pier because of a guard, but we sat on the rocks right next to it. As usual, one shot of vodka in my Schweppes did not get me even a bit tipsy, but I still had plenty of fun.

I felt “lost” for the first time on Friday. Without the festival or class to give me a bit of structure, I slept in until 11 and was at a loss for anything to do until I met up with Kaison and Tolu for a bit of cooking. We toyed with going to Ventimiglia for a while, but eventually we decided to get a bus out to Antibes to see Carrefour, the French Super Wal-Mart. Carrefour was a monstrous building (about 3x the size of a Super Wal-Mart), and I bought some replacement wine glasses for my room, we all tried to find a TV as big as Tolu’s TV at home (out of luck there), and one of the four huge rows of alcohol had flavored vodka samples?! I think Carrefour would have been more fun if we went more in the middle of the trip—we didn’t need any supplies and couldn’t fit much else into our luggage, so we could only look around for a few aimless hours.

I packed, wrote out my belated birthday card for my mom (the one time on the trip, outside of movie theatres, that I cried), and farted around on the internet for the rest of the night. Lots of the kids went out to the rocks even though it looked like rain, and Samantha and I didn’t feel like falling into the Med so we just got Grand Marnier crepes and ice cream. When Lauren and Lindsey cajoled us into venturing out around 11 everyone was coming back in, but then we had plenty of company to go get one last bit of junk food and have a potluck of remaining groceries in Tolu’s and Amanda’s room. We all played some iTunes and I struck up a chorus of “Damn Girl” with my JT CD, but around 12 I went to sleep so I could get up early to shower and finish packing.

Our final morning in France was wonderful. Most of the folks in Tolu’s room stayed up all night—a few of them had to take a 4:30 am shuttle to the airport, and the others wanted to see them off—so there were a lot of yawns and tired hugs when the later shuttles left. America’s Next Top Kaison left at 7:20 and made Tolu get a little misty, but we cheered up at Fournee Provencale over some amazing cappuccino. We toasted to a great trip with our orange juice, and Tolu gave me a piece of her baguette, so I felt a bit overcome. Our shuttle got to Couleurs Soleil a little bit before our 8:20 reservation time, but six of the students and I crammed in all of our luggage and took off for a seaside drive into Nice.

Our plane, originally scheduled to leave at 11:30, was delayed until 12:45, but we were glad of it when the slow check-in attendants tested Tolu (over her passport) and Jimari (over his buddy pass). We got to the terminal just before the 10:30 sign-in cutoff and sat, slept, and drank 3.60 cokes. When reminiscing about American food, I discovered that I “just wanted to eat a goddamned avocado” to the delight of my fellow travelers. The flight from Nice to JFK only took 7 hours instead of 9, and I have to say that my waiting-in-line skills served me well. I stared off into space for most of the time, which made the trip go by pretty quickly and painlessly, and the 2-year-old girl who babbled and screamed most of the flight could not make me mad because she was seriously too cute. The Cannes trip taught this loner to appreciate being inside her own brain even more, so I didn’t mind that I wasn’t sitting next to my friends and chatting; I thought up an idea that I might run with to write a screenplay and reminisced about most of the good movies I saw/looked forward to seeing again in the States.

Customs in JFK were not as awful as I thought they might be, and the flight to the ATL was still on time for a 4:30 take-off. I could use my incredibly hot red RAZR phone for the first time in a month, enjoying one voicemail from my friend Jenna amid FIVE messages from Vision Video about a late rental. I yelled my digits out to Tolu from my spot in a separate customs line, but she actually made it through the non-citizens line in time to see us off at our gate before waiting on her 6:50 flight. Delta made history with a 15-minute early arrival in Atlanta, and after all my traveling and waiting I finally saw my mom at the top of the escalator to baggage claim. We had a little snafu when I hugged her too hard and made her new surgery wound seize up (she didn’t tell me about it in time! o_O), and I wondered who on earth was picking me up and swinging me around the baggage carousel when my dad got in from parking the car. It was so great to see them both again; I gave them their gifts over some Mexican food (including avocados!) in the car, and I had not trouble staying up until midnight (6 am French time) gabbing and sharing photos with them.

Having a Nice time on the Cote d'Azur

June 3-5

On Sunday most of the stragglers still in JLP met with Charley, which took awhile because he went to town on Mandy’s paper. Eventually Tolu, Kaison, and I decided to go into Antibes. Kaison said he knew the way because he had been out to dinner with Allison and a few of the others the night before, but we got lost on the narrow streets near the JLP train station and had to ask a little kid riding a bike where Boulevard President Wilson was. I gathered that it ran past the lycee, so we wandered until we hit a major road that had a high school and started walking down a street as steep as the road into Sin City and/or Lumpkin Street. There were a lot of pharmacies (as usual) as well as Asian fast-food restaurants and locksmiths (Kaison said this last species probably sprang up due to the number of car break-ins—he had already seen two on his trips to town).

Eventually we got to the middle of the city, where I had a deliciously sickening beignet a crème and Tolu got a nutella banana crepe (good, but not the same level of crunchy excellence that is the nutella banini). We wandered through the old part of the town (the only pretty part), found the hidden archaeological museum on the coast, looked at porno art at the open-air market, found but could not eat “Mexican nachos” (the kitchen was closed?!), and toodled back home past a lot of other good-looking food before I grazed in my room.

I was planning on going to Beaulieu-sur-mer on Monday to look at a Greek mansion and another mansion full of statues on the coastal mountains, but the train I wanted to take was cancelled. So, I improvised and took myself to Nice with Samantha’s directions and had a great time just doing me. I looked in a few shops I had missed with the big group (the McDonalds closer to the beach was too cool! It had stonework on the inside!) and made my way to the beach over the heavily under-construction Place Massena. The beach was in its natural form—covered in little rocks, with no sand—but it was about as crowded as the beaches in Antibes since it was a nice day.

I spotted the “white thing” Samantha had told me about pretty quickly and made a beeline for it, power-walking behind a cute British guy. There was an “ascenseur” to take you to the top of the rock, but I wanted to be a badass and climb to the top. Bad/good idea. My legs ached after the first two sets of stairs, where I took my first pictures of the town below. But I made my way up all of the strange rock face with trees growing from it to find the ruins of a chapel, a graveyard, a waterfall, and two restaurants/souvenir stands. Different sides of the rock showed every bit of Nice, from the Bay of Angels that I was first walking along to the inland hills to the other bay, where the Corsican ferry could have taken me to San Remo (! it keeps taunting me!). I would have liked to have had someone to talk with about the beautiful view, but I enjoyed having some time to myself to just think, go where I wanted to go, and start scheming about getting my family there for a vacation.

I walked through all of the old city, looking in most of the weird chocolate shops and olive oil shops (they had a L’Olivier shop, the actual store for the fancy brand of olive oil I got my mother for Christmas! they had little olive trees for sale and I wanted one really bad!). I found not one but TWO 96 Flavors kiosks and had fig and pear sorbets at the first one. No beer flavored ice cream for me, but it was so good anyway!

I got back in time to chat with Charley for about an hour about what drinks to make (pastis) and what grade I got on my paper (A), and then I found Tolu and Kaison for our first run of French fry frying. Dinner stretched out into a late-night Grand Marnier crepe run, and I think I’m almost as addicted to those now as I am to nutella baninis.

It was weird going back to class on Tuesday. Everyone had fun stories from going to Bordeaux, Cinque Terre, and Florence, and we talked about “bad” movies and sex scenes for most of class after Allison recounted her dark tale of camping with Paul Cox in his unrefurbished French mansion. After class I got a blue Schweppes with Andy and Chris at Juan les Bread and rushed off in the rain to Cannes on what I thought was a trip to get something at Galleries Lafayette for my mother. Didn’t happen (my gift was out of stock!), and neither did a salad at FNAC since they had weird ones like Tandoori chicken and Salmon that day. For once I felt underdressed in Cannes, sticking out like a sore thumb on the Rue d’Antibes in my cheap pink flip flops, so I took to the beach and found a nutella banini, which I ate in front of the newly redecorated Palais (World Perfumery Congress this weekend)! I also made a stop by Monoprix, where I put the last jewel in my Schweppes crown with the purchase of “Citron Lychee Cactus” Schweppes.

Lazy day back in JLP. Everyone was finishing up the last paper for Nate’s class (experiential reporting—I talked about my encounter with the French businessmen, which I’ll probably post here soon), and in our boredom Tolu and I went to get potatoes for more French fries. We deep-fried a whole bag of potatoes and inhaled them with Geoffrey (hi, Geoffrey!) and a few visitors who we lured in with the delicious scent of frying sunflower oil. The cactus Schweppes went down easy, and plans were made to mix it with vodka for Andy and Chris’s screening of Little Bruno, the favorite “bad movie” discussed in class (actually a DVD one of the actors gave to the kids who dropped by the Gray d’Albion during the festival… “It’s the best fucking gangster movie you’ll ever see. I’m in it.”).

The set-up for the world premiere of Little Bruno in room 223 was impressive. They had rolled out the red carpet (one of the blankets from the hotel linen closet), and people wore their bow-ties in the roped-off “orchestre” section. I hooked my way in with one of my patented “invitation?” signs and sat on the futons in the balcony, making only a small drink for the drinking game of “drink every time something’s so bad you laugh.” I made it to the part with the guidance counselor’s sweaty moobs, but it just got too ridiculous; Samantha and I poured out our mostly unfinished drinks back in our room and watched Wedding Crashers. Around 1 we all got a text to go do tequila shots for Allison’s birthday at a bar in JLP, but I was too tired (and broke, and unwilling to get publicly plastered) and went to sleep at the old-granny hour of 1 am.

Tu vuo fa l'Americano...

May 31-June 02

We had our last class with Nate on Thursday! He had to fly back for the Peabodies—which we all understand and which many of us hope to pull some strings and attend next year—and we’ll miss him this next week despite a lineup of fun meetings with Allison. We read a few reviews of the more popular movies, but then Nate called on me to read my write-up of Les Chansons d’Amour to bring a French one into the mix. I was pretty nervous, because it was my first review and pretty awkwardly written, but even though I skipped around and stuttered a bit it seemed like everyone liked it OK. After a lot of sarcastic reviews, mine had some self-effacing humor that made my point without being mean, and it was a goofy enough movie to get a few people interested in seeing it.

I wanted to go into Cannes at least one more time, so after a few meetings with Charley several people joined me on a pilgrimage. It rained and tried to make us feel sad for the now un-decorated town, but Cannes has a lot of character anyway. Tolu and I watched me eat/ate a salad at FNAC before meeting everyone else at Subway, and then we wandered around the few stores that had souvenirs for the film fest. Lots of knock-offs for some of the kids’ parents and friends, and a new issue of Empire for me for a well-worth-it 7.80 euro. We got back around 6 and everyone had to write the rest of the night to finish up the final two reviews (!).

Friday took Tolu and me to Italy! We had heard about an outdoor flea market in Ventimiglia, the last stop on the French train and the first city across the border, and shopping fanatics as we are we could not pass it up. It cost 13 euro for a roundtrip ticket and 1:30 hours each way, but the trip was too fun! The train snakes up the coast past Antibes, Nice, and Monaco, so we got tons of beautiful pictures of ritzy beach houses and mountains falling into the sea (all, sadly, with the mark of bird crap that was on my train window :P).

Ventimiglia was a very interesting little town. There were liquor stores seriously every two steps, with cute little “Eurodrink” signs and bottles upon bottles of grappa and limoncello and absinthe (but no Jager!). We also saw a ton of groceries each with their own special Nutella snacks: a weekly pack of seven mini Nutella jars labeled for each day of the week, a bottle with a section of orange juice to drink with your Nutella, and a 3 kilo boulder of Nutella with a golden lid for 22 euros. The best grocery shopping took place in a three-aisle, covered farmer’s market, where you can find every possible kind of produce for really cheap (wish I got either those figs or the red bell peppers the size of my head!). The open-air market stretched up the beach, and while we got some nice views of the hills of Ventimiglia in the distance there was little good shopping to be found. Tolu got two jerseys of some of her favorite soccer players and an incredibly cute I-don’t-know-what-to-call-it outfit that looks kind of like overalls but club worthy, we both tried about every nasty-ass type of bitter Fanta the Italians have come up with, and I gorged myself on a huge piece of focaccia before we caught a train home in the rain.

Today was the first day completely open to my wanderlust, and after getting up at a leisurely 10 am I caught a morning train to Cannes. Sadly, after all of my gushing about the amazing white trenchcoat, I came to my senses (or just got enough buyer’s remorse/need for the extra 80 euros) and returned it. It was fun to see Cannes again on a sunny day, with nothing but locals milling around in no kind of film-industry rush. I felt like the heaviest weight had been lifted off me with the 80 euros restored to my credit card; I had stopped by my favorite store, Les Freres Mariages (a tea shop), just to do some window-licking, but when I saw that the tea I liked was 13 euros instead of 18 I bought some, guilt-free!

I got a ticket back to JLP, but I remembered making plans to get lunch with Kaison and Tolu in Nice and decided to just ride a little further than I had paid for. They actually got on the same train with me and we had a good 30-minute ride up the coast, and then we went to *~*KFC*~*! Ah, how wonderful it was to return to civilization (or, at least, capitalism)! No mashed potatoes or biscuits or macaroni & cheese or anything too Southern, but my chicken tenders and fries made a little oasis of Southern-style comfort for me amid all the yelling French teenagers. Oh yeah, we had found Ryan and Jill on the train, and in exchange for my “curry sauce” (spicy French-fry dip) Ryan gave me some extra ketchup, so I really went to town.

Tolu was mad excited to go shopping for cheap and awesome clothes at H & M. It was just a few steps down the strange rue Jean Medecin (lots of pretty old six-story buildings, but under construction in the middle and very cluttered), and when we got there all of the shoppers in the Cote d’Azur had already descended upon the little three-story shop. After a while I knew I wasn’t going to buy any more clothes, so Kaison and I left Tolu to her devices and went two doors down to FNAC. Oh. my. god. Love! Pure and simple, I could live at FNAC. This one was FIVE STORIES and lit with strange red blacklights, achieving the look of a fancy bordello. I am a technology ho, after all, so I drank in all of the plasma TVs and French video games and even the BDs on the top floor. Got to remember though that the quaint, rooftop-café variety of FNAC in Cannes still holds a very special place in my heart, but I truly lost my FNAC virginity today when I *~*bought the Chansons d’Amour soundtrack*~*. Tolu, after rejoining us, got pictures of every stage of my purchase (freaking out in line, saying hi to the cashier, pulling out my money, and getting a receipt), which I will make you look at once I see you in person.

Bill, Laura, and Mandy, as well as Ryan and Jill on their own, met us to trek over to the Virgin Megastore. Pretty, and much lighter, but not as awesome as FNAC. It had a weird, smoky café full of fancy-looking people sitting with their dogs. INDOORS. The French are weird. They were even weirder at Nicetoile, the four-story indoor mall closer to the train station. No shops that were particularly cool (I told Jill later that it was more Gwinnett Place than Lenox Square), but Kaison and I had fun getting fancy soft-serve from a chocolate store, seeing both a monster-sized baby in a carriage and a four-year-old with a pacifier in a home goods store, and looking for strange teapots. The rain eventually drove us out of Nice too, but I will be back tomorrow to see the old city and find the gelato shop with beer-flavored ice cream.