Tag: croisette

image credit: cia-france.com

After my friend kindly dropped me off at the address of the apartment I had booked in Cannes, I went into the building that I had seen a photo of on the booking.com page. However, it turned out that it was not the apartment building, but a retirement home called Residence Villa Gallia. It looked more like a four star hotel than a retirement home and had a hotel-like reception. Luckily, one of the residents, a nice French lady who spoke very good English, had just come in through the main doors with her little dog and helpfully explained to me that it was ´an old people´s home´ and explained to the lady at reception that I was lost and looking for an apartment that I had booked. The lady at the reception generously allowed me to use a small sitting room attached to the lobby, where I was able to charge my phone and find the codes. Ofcourse, once again, my iphone battery had drained and I could not access whatsapp, which is where the door codes for the apartment had been sent to me. It turned out that the apartment I had booked was in the building directly opposite the retirement home.

Once finally inside the apartment building, I was immediately met by the smell of garbage! It seemed that two big grey garbage bins had been left right at the entrance and clearly had not been emptied for several days. Next, I discovered that the building had no elevator! The staircase was narrow and curved with small, steep steps and was quite dangerous. I really don´t know how I managed to get my big suitcase up those stairs. When I got to my floor, which was the second floor (nightmare), the lighting in the staircase was nearly non-existent and I could not see the numbers and symbols on the keypad properly. I also could not find my reading glasses! But just as I was about to despair, I heard someone coming up the steps! It was a man who was staying on the floor above and he managed to enter the code for me and retrieve the key. What a stroke of luck! I went inside the apartment and on first impression, it looked clean and modern and a bit like a hotel room. Well read on…. as you probably know, first impressions can be deceiving!

image credit: seecannes.com

I went out for a walk and found my way to the Croisette, which took about 15-20 minutes to get to from the apartment, which was not too far from the train station. The sun was setting and the view was quite pretty, though it was already a bit dark. I was getting hungry and it was approaching dinner time, so I looked for a place to eat and eventually decided to go into a lively looking bistro called 72 Croisette. The waiters were friendly and gave me a table inside as I wanted to charge my phone.

image credit: Tripadvisor

Sitting at a table across from me, was an American couple. The man, who looked to be in his mid to late forties, was wearing a red baseball cap and a white polo shirt. There was something about him that said, dressed casually, but billionaire (or at least multi-millionaire). The woman had shoulder length blondish hair and was wearing a leopard print tank top, beige khaki shorts, and a large gold coloured bangle. The man was sitting facing in my direction and the woman was facing him, so I could not see her face. Later, when she stood up and turned around, I realized that she was at least in her late 50s. She was about to leave the table, when almost like an afterthought, she turned back towards the man and quickly gave him a perfunctory kiss before heading to the bathroom. For a moment, the man looked mildly pleased or possibly even amused, though he showed very little outward emotion, quickly going back to an entirely expressionless state, in that way that corporate businessmen do… I thought, hmm, why does she just not seem like either a girlfriend or a wife. Look, it´s none of my business, but something told me that their alliance was likely an arrangement of the temporary sort.

I decided I needed to stop people-watching and focus on ordering some food as it was already dark and I was going to have to walk back to the apartment on my own. The waitress, a young, middle eastern lady with her long, dark hair in a ponytail, was very nice and told me that Cannes was quite safe and not like Paris! However, I was a little disturbed by the sight of her lips, which I tried not to look at while she was speaking. They seemed to have been recently injected with a rather large amount filler and looked inflated and highly unnatural in their shape. Poor girl, I thought, (mainly thinking of the pain of the injections) maybe she feels she has to look like that to work here?

After much deliberation, I ordered a prawn and asparagus risotto and a coke, which came to a rather expensive 45 euros! (Later, when paying the bill, the waitress told me,´service is not included´). As I mentioned before, eating at restaurants anywhere on the Cote d´Azur is extortionate. For example, this bistro is nice and the food tasted good, but it´s casual and is not a fancy restaurant, yet expensive. But then, it is on the Croisette. I told myself, okay, but you´re on the Croisette, at least you´ve experienced it. Hmm… As it became night, I started to see (and hear) some very expensive-looking sports cars being driven around at high speed. One suddenly screeched to a halt right in front of the bistro. The driver looked around smiling and waiting for everyone to notice him, then took off again to repeat the circuit round the Croisette. It was clearly the hour for showing off.

image credit: carltoncannes.com

I strolled back along the Croisette, passing by a few small groups of people making their way into the beautifully lit Ritz Carlton hotel, dressed to the nines. They did all look very smart. It was the first time in many years that I had seen young girls wearing stilletos. In London, I hardly see anyone wearing heels, let alone stilletos these days. Comfort seems to have won over fashion. For my own part, I have boxes and boxes of high heels bought over the years that I never wear. Some of them have indeed never been worn! They have become vintage, I suppose soon to become antiques..(not very difficult these days…Apple Support keeps referring to my ten year old iphone as ´vintage´). Here, on the Croisette, however, the girls looked great in their stilletos, complementing their chic black dresses or tops with miniskirts with mini designer handbags. I couldn´t help but wonder though, just how on earth they were managing to walk in them. Mind you, they were walking quite slowly….

The next day, the weather was not great, with lots of rain forecast for the afternoon. I went out in the morning and went to a boulangerie that I had spotted the previous evening and got myself some coffee and a pastry. I asked a girl outside the cafe if she knew of any supermarkets in the area. It turned out that she and her friend were from Ukraine and had stayed in the same area the year before and so were familiar with it. As her friend spoke better English, she explained where the supermarket was and it turned out to be quite close by. After buying a few groceries, I headed back to the apartment and stayed in, working from my laptop. It was a pretty uneventful day.

However, that night, at about 4 am, a sudden, very loud buzzing sound woke me up! It scared me as it sounded as if someone was pressing a buzzer at my door, but I knew that there was no buzzer outside the door, so that was very confusing especially in my only partially-awake state. Unfortunately, there was no peephole in the door, so I could not check whether there was anyone there, and I certainly did not want to open the door at that time of night. I thought, is there some sort of emergency? I rushed to the window which was facing the retirement home, half-expecting to see lots of elderly folk in their dressing gowns standing outside due to some sort of incident, but all was quiet and there was no one in the street below. It turned out that the sound was coming from the electrical box in the wall near the bed. After a few minutes, it stopped. However, it then carried on sounding again every twenty minutes or so, right up until about 9 or 10 am!

It was truly awful and ofcourse I did not get much sleep. But not only that, when I went to take a shower, I was horrified to find that there was this horrible black mold in the bottom corners of the shower that I had not noticed before! Not only that, but when I moved one of the pillows off the bed, I saw a small blood stain on the sheet. Talk about gross. After many calls to the property and booking.com, I eventually managed to get a refund for the remaining nights of my stay. Getting my suitcase back down those steps was very scary and I was relieved to get downstairs in one piece and to leave that horrible place.

The lobby of the JW Marriott Cannes

image credit: marriott.com

I had no real plan since originally, I was supposed to stay in Cannes for another three days, so I headed back to the Croisette, this time with my big suitcase in tow, and went into the five star JW Marriott and up to their lobby, thinking I could at least stop there to think about what to do next. The reception staff were very polite and kind and patiently listened to my predicament. Unfortunately, their rooms were well out of my budget, but they offered for me to take a seat and relax while I figured out what to do and even gave suggestions of where I might stay. After about an hour, during which I managed to get my phone partially charged, I headed down the Croisette along the beach. It had rained quite a bit and so all the benches along the beach were wet. Therefore, I wasn´t able to sit down and had to keep moving.

The restaurants on the beach itself were open, but each of them had a set of rickety wooden steps you had to go down to get to it, which was clearly going to be impossible with my suitcase. Furthermore, I could see that the outdoor seating was wet, so it would only be possible to sit indoors. It was cloudy and everything looked a bit grey and dreary. So this is Cannes, I thought.

At this point, I started to feel more and more, that I had already spent far too much time in Cannes. To be honest, the place disappointed me tremendously and I found it frightfully dull and superficial. It seemed to be a place created specifically for the purpose of shopping and showing off, which ofcourse it is. Yes, yes, I know…it´s famous for the film festival and you´re going to say, oh you should go there in the summer or when it´s buzzing because of the festival. Well, perhaps….but quite honestly, I felt the place was lacking a soul. However, if I do go back, I think I would go and see the old town, Le Suquet, which is supposed to be a nice contrast with its medieval buildings, winding streets, and views of the port.

So… if you want to go shopping and show off your wealth OR want to watch people shopping and showing off their wealth, then Cannes and the Croisette could well be for you! Clearly, it wasn´t for me, so within a couple of hours after leaving the apartment, I started heading to….Antibes! I´ll tell you all about my four days in Antibes in my next post!