I Made It!

Bonjour! Bon Matin!

I had my first French crepe this morning as well as my first French train ride and my first French walk along the beach. I also chased my first French pigeon.

The plane rides were pretty awesome. One old man sitting next to me even gave me Juicy Fruit and showed me pictures of his son's wedding. I have to give props to Bryan for securing me the emergency exit row for the extra leg room on the flight from ATL to JFK. Since I last flew with Delta, they have installed personal touchscreen televisions on the backs of the seats for us to watch most of the Oscar nominated movies and also good television series like Dr. Who. They even had games and a much improved music selection, including the Best Hits of Yanni, of course it was under spa selections.

We landed this morning at the Nice airport and then made our way to the hotel by cab, which are fancier and cleaner in France. No creepy yellow buses or dingy taxis here! The downside was that it was a national French holiday today so the fare was hiked, or so they told us. We were sure that they were just trying to trick us for being naiive American tourists, but it turns out they were telling the truth.

Our group settled in, unpacked, and then found the train station so we could venture out to Cannes to scope our the territory and take advantage of some good photo-ops. I practiced my star-spotting and thought I saw Jennifer Morrison, Dr. Cameron from House, but she had red hair and wrong-colored eyes. Gotta stay alert. I will not miss the celebrities, in fact, I may see more of them than there actually are. Unless Jennifer Morrison really did decide to dye her hair and get contacts... which would mean I was right. I was probably right.

Besides seeing a famous actress, I saw a two-story carousel and Roman Polanski's hand print. There were a bunch of workers setting up stages and whatnot while getting ready for the festival (WHICH STARTS IN 4 DAYS! Ahh!), and so we watched while some men fixed up lights for the red carpet.

Most of us, finally feeling the effects of staying up for many consecutive hours, fell asleep on the short train ride back to JLP, but we're still going to fight to stay up until about 9 to try and avoid jet lag.

I'll try to add pictures to this later, but right now there are about ten of us all trying to connect to our intertubes and things seem to be running slowly.