Cannes

Flushed with success at getting Carrefour to give me a full refund on Friday (see previous post), I headed down to Cannes to pick up J and her sister who had spent the week at the monastery on the islands.

Now I don’t like Cannes. Apart from the main drag, the Croisette, with its fancy shops and hotels, there’s nothing to the place. One street off the front and you could be in any nondescript town with lines of apartment blocks dominating the landscape. I suppose the hills which lead to Mougins and La Bocca give it a bit of character but Nice leaves it standing with its grand squares, large gardens and tree lined boulevards.

The other thing I don’t like about Cannes is the traffic – it crawls around and it’s usually Ferraris, Lambos and other exotic vehicles which are doing the crawling. Whether they are window shopping as they drive, looking for a parking space (everyone is!) or just posing, I don’t know but it’s a surreal feeling to have to ‘beep’ a Ferrari to get it to speed up a bit.

And it was as I was crawling along the Croisette in J’s battered old Honda CRV that I noticed the traffic was slower than usual and then I found the cause. Outside the main casino were parked exotic cars galore. Now I’ve seen the ‘normal’ practice in France of double parking and it’s usually an old Clio hemming in an old Renault but this was amazing – double parked Lamborghinis!  I looked at the number plates and it was obvious the Arabs were in town – every number plate was scripted in Arabic.

There was a Bugatti Veyron in gleaming black and silver (all £1 million pounds worth), several Lambos, dozens of Ferraris and a couple of Bentley’s (the racy coupé versions) – all with Arabic number plates. The casino must’ve been making a mint.

And as I got to the end of the parked procession of cars, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, there were another two fancy cars which I did not recognize – and I’m a bit of a car buff! The picture above was taken as I crawled past and I almost threw up when I passed the pink one. What on earth was he thinking, although I suppose it could have been an Arab lady?

Anyway, needless to say, my battered old Honda didn’t attract any glances except from the doorman (bouncer?) in the Jimmy Choo shop when he thought I was going to pull up on the pavement outside their boutique – as if! Then again, given the state of my car, maybe he thought a ram raid was about to take place and I can see his point. You could run the Honda through a car park battering it against every other car and at the end of it, you wouldn’t notice any difference – every panel is dented and bashed anyway. But, on reflection, I think I’d prefer to drive my Honda, battered as it is, through Tourrettes than that pink thing in the photo.

PS – if anybody can recognize what it is, please let me know.