I Cannes, You Cannes, We all Cannes

The train ride to Nice, France was EXACTLY what I needed after the last few busy days in Paris. I arrived at the station with plenty of time to spare and plopped into an empty seat in the front of the train. I was sitting in a four-seater section with 3 other women. One of them was in her 70's and kept sneezing every 30 seconds. She better not have Swine Flu, I thought to myself. The other woman was a brunette in her early 40's and appeared to be kind of jittery. The train slowly began chugging along as the redhead sitting to my left waved to her young son through the window until he was just a distant speck on the horizon. I laid my head against the window. Little raindrops slid down the glass and the gray countryside began zipping by me. Within minutes, I was fast asleep.

"Excuse-moi, Mademoiselle."

I wiped the drool from the side of my cheek and looked at the conductor guy who was tapping my shoulder.

"Vous billet."

"Oh, yeah. My ticket. It's right here....J'ai un billet de Eurail. Parce que, ou est 7-25?" I mumbled in French.

"This is first class, ma'am. But that's ok," he said in perfect English.

He punched my ticket and kept walking.

Nice! First class and I only had to pay 3 Euros. The rest of my time in France seemed to go alot like that--pure luck & chance.

When I arrived in the city of Nice, I had about 3 hours to kill before my friend, Reena's plane arrived. So I dragged my huge rolling luggage bag AND duffel bag (WHAT WAS I THINKING PACKING LIKE THIS) and I found a little buffet restaurant next to the train station. As soon as I walked in, I realized I had no idea where the buffet started, and whether or not I should pay first, or order, or what. A guy who I assumed to be the assistant manager must have seen the confusion in my face. After about 5 minutes of my broken French and his broken English, I understood that I was supposed to pay first, then order my burger at the grill. The manager's name was Martin and he was from Senegal. He brought me a cup of coffee when I was done eating. We sat together for about an hour. He asked me questions about America. I asked him about Senegal and France. And before I knew it, three hours had passed and it was time to meet Reena.

It was no easy task finding her in the mob of people at the train station. I had taken my contacts out and basically-I'm legally blind without them. I saw the fuzzy image of a girl who looked like my friend walk by with someone. That COULDN'T have been Reena. She's traveling alone. But when the two women walked by again, I screamed out her name.

"Shannon?" Reena asked squinting at me.

"Reena, is that you?" I squinted back at her.

"Yeah. I forgot my glasses in California. I can't see a thing," she said. "I found this nice woman to help me find you. No one else around me spoke English!"

By the time we'd arrived at our hotel (which was a 15-minute drive from Cannes) it was Midnight and Reena was starving. I knew we probably weren't going to find anything open, but we decided to try to venture out by foot anyway. After an hour of walking around in the dark, we finally called it a night.

The next morning, Reena was up bright & early getting breakfast in the hotel lobby. I dragged my tired behind out of bed, and we caught a bus into downtown Cannes. The center of the city was swarming with people for the Cannes Film Festival. We decided to stop at a restaurant along the beach and scope out the scene.

"So how are we going to get into parties," Reena asked.

"Well, most of the invites I got were for earlier in the week, so we've missed those premieres. But let's hit up an Internet cafe and see if we can find the hot party spots."

At the Internet cafe, Reena worked some British guy sitting at the computer next to her, and scored us an invite to two parties that night. Meanwhile, I worked the web and found two of the clubs where all of the celebs were photographed the night before.

We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on the beach and taking in all of the excitement of the festival. We met a tv host from Britain who was shooting segments for his show and he recruited us for a soccer goal kicking contest. And hopefully that video will never see the light of day. Little did we know our adventure in the South of France would REALLY begin that night......