It’s only been five days and already I feel like a resident of the seaside community of Juan-Les-Pins. I wake up around five a.m., drink my Starbucks instant, which I heat in a mini electric kettle, take my shower with my sweet-smelling French shampoo, and am dressed and out the door by 7:15 a.m., giving me more than enough time to make my way leisurely down to the Palais du Festival. One of the problems I confront every day is where to park.
The truth is, any person with common sense would never rent a car to work the Cannes Film Festival. You either find a place in town or you take the train or the bus. But I have no common sense. That is why I am paying for a rental car, rental car insurance, gas and on many days, parking. The only reason I’m renting a car, other than sheer stupidity, is that my daughter is staying with me and I need to be able to get to her if I have to. So I’ll pay through the nose for peace of mind.
Determined to cut off one piece of the financial catastrophe I’m creating, I decided I would try to find a parking place. As it happened, I did wind my way up the backstreets and found a street with plenty of places to park, only a 10-minute walk from the Palais. Problem solved. The next day I returned and there were no empty places. So far, I’ve only had one free parking day.
Now that I arrive at the Palais so much earlier, I have come to witness a different side of Cannes. Walking down the still-dewy streets on the way in to “work,” the breath from last night’s activities still hangs in the air. Women stumble out of doorways dangling their tiny sweaters over their shoulder as they click-clack their high heels towards a taxi, their own story of the night before now theirs to keep but ours to imagine.
Night clubs still have a faintly beating heart, with guests emerging in the light of day, their hair flattened by sweat, cigarettes still at the ready. Some of them don’t seem to realize the night has come to an end and it’s time for the shopkeepers and civilians of Cannes to start their day.
As the day begins to take shape, the grounds are covered with festival-goers, few of them locals. Sidewalks fill up with overdressed women and the men they’re dragging along.
The day’s activities are made even worse if there happens to be a big star event in town, as there was on Saturday when Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Geoffrey Rush and Ian McShane brought "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" to Cannes.
Also read: Cannes, Day 5: Yo-Ho Yo-Ho, A Pirate's Life for Cannes
The appearance of Depp caused such a frenzy, you’d have thought it was the president himself.
