Saturday, May 19, 2007

Cannes Day 2-3



Cannes- A few impressions if you ever plan on attending the Cannes Film Festival.

First get a local mobile phone. If you don't have a phone, you are SOL on the party scene. There are literally hundreds of parties every night. An invite is just a phone call away. You can't network without a phone. A phone in Cannes is easy. I bought an unlocked GSM phone off eBay for $30.00, make sure it has 900-1800 mhz, and then you just have to buy a French SIM card and your all set. The Orange phone company was selling pay-as-you-go phones with a starter card for about 40 euros. Then you just buy recharges to top off the phone for more time.

Second thing is the internet. Make sure the place your staying has an internet connection. France is lagging behind and it's not common. The flat I'm staying doesn't have broadband and I tried sniffing a WiFi connection in my neighborhood but is nothing was available. So I'm stuck dragging my laptop to an internet cafe every day.

A car is pretty useless during the festival because many roads are closed and the traffic is gridlocked. But a bicycle or Vespa maybe an option. If you wait until you get to Cannes, its already too late, everything will be booked. I found that out the hard way. The bigger problem is that the rental places are not online, you have to call them directly.

Do you have to speak French in Cannes? No problem. Everybody here seems to understand English. You can just point at menu items. Hollywood doesn't speak French. You don't have to either.

Cannes is like Hollywood. The bigger, the more expensive, the glitzier, the better. Multi-million dollar yachts, Ferrari's, Arab sheiks, are commonplace.

Last night, Jessica Simpson had a party on a yacht and then walked two yachts down to party with Kid Rock.

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