June 22 – Cannes / Nice

When we were booking our stay on the Cote d’Azur, we had a choice between Nice and Cannes.  After visiting Cannes today, I can state without reservation that we made the better choice by staying in Nice. I can honestly not think of one good reason why you should go to Cannes.

Cannes is the sight of the world famous Cannes Film Festival held each spring.  It is located about a ninety minute bus drive west of Nice along the Mediterranean.  The ride to Cannes is boring as you go through mainly residential areas and nondescript towns.

Cannes could be a synonym for pretentious.  The area where the main film festival takes place is all flash and glitter but the main theatre where the red carpet is located looks like any other auditorium.

Marg on the red carpet

The public beach is only a small sliver of the main beach with all the rest of the beach having been taken over for the exclusive use of hotel guests or beach club members.  This is too bad as the beach is actually a sandy beach.  With all these exclusive enclaves on the beach, it feels as if the kinetic energy has been sucked from the city.

Beach in Cannes

The stores along the La Croisette, the beach front promenade, are all high end designer stores.  Hugo Boss, Versace and others fill the stores with their over priced fashions.  Because today is Sunday most of the stores are closed so I don’t know what type of business they do.

La Croisette

The old village is a small area and it has very little character either.

All in all, I would say that Cannes is devoid of life, lacks spirit and seems dull in comparison to every other city that we have visited on this trip.

Cannes's Town Square

The last couple of nights as we've strolled back to the apartment from the Promenade des Anglais we've seen this lady of the evening who appears to be in her sixties.  She is dress in this long flowing low cut red dress and has an enormous red bow in her hair.  She is the compilation of every western saloon madame in every bad John Wayne cowboy movie ever made.  It is a bit sad to see her working the streets at her age, but her costume is so over the top that it is actually funny.

You would think that with the World Cup being played, there would be plenty of souvenirs in the stores. This is not the case.  Football tee shirts are nonexistent but there are some soccer jerseys available at $100 or more in the high priced stores along Nice's pedestrian shopping mall.  Even the reaction in bars seems to be muted. I suspect that maybe France doesn't have high hopes for victory at this year’s tournament.

As this might be our last night in Nice, depending on the train strike, we went to a very nice restaurant called Restaurant Francin. You have to love a restaurant that proclaims to be totally French with no pasta and no pizza.  Marg had duck and I had veal with a nice Provence wine.

There was a garbage dumpster on the street next to the restaurant in which a local shoe store had put boxes of shoes that for some reason they could no longer sell.  The crowd that gathered to examine the shoes was amazing. The dumpster was busy for at least an hour as people acquired these fashionable shoes.
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