Cannes

Thursday began at 3:30 AM in London. It ended at midnight in a rizty hotel in the french riviera. At 3:30 AM I woke up, still in LA time, took a 5 am shuttle to Heathrow, boarded a shuttle there to the Luton airport which is an hour north of heathrow, took an Easyjet from there to Nice, cussed at my non-working prepaid fone card, found an electronics store and purchased a prepaid cellphone, then jumped on a train to Cannes.
There I met with Kartik Singh, friend of a friend who is a film director living in Paris. This is his sixth Cannes, and it shows- everywhere we go, through crowds of people the size of Chicago, he always has someone to hug and greet from a past Cannes.
We walked to our apt-- on the 3rd floor with a terrace facing the ocean and the hundreds of huge opulent yachts that are hovering over the festival- and just a 10 minute walk from the event itself.
As for the festival du Cannes, thoughts on my first few hrs: there is nothing like this anywhere in the world. Its pretty overwhelming at first, cutting through crowds of thousands and thousands of people, just yards from the yacht-covered ocean, and all of the elements of a giant outdoor festival combined with the ritz of hollywood, most of the first few hrs were spent trying to understand whats going on.
Kartik and I met up with his friend Ian, after I got my badge, and we strolled into a few pavilions, met some people, traded business cards with lots of strangers, ended up drinking in many different places with filmmakers from Slovenia, Australia, the Philipines. Then, I learned that our badges allow us into the lounge at the hotel where many of the stars are staying. It was a funny thing to be sitting, drinking at a table outside on the terrace while 5 yards away from us an actor (Jude Law) is walking to his limo while being screamed at from a mob of fans behind a barricade. Being a famous actor must be a very strange life.