Cannes should be Canned

Sailed over to Cannes -- given how much noise people make about Cannes, it would have been unthinkable to skip it.

Well, Cannes was a huge disappointment. It's just an overgrown urban environment, bigger than a village, smaller than a city, that combines the worst of both worlds. The famous beaches are pretty narrow and incredibly crowded. This is really no different than Jones Beach or the beaches in New Jersey. There certainly is enough silicon on the beach to build millions of the next generation multicore processors, and this is without counting the silicon dioxide that makes up the sand.

Typical beach scene in Cannes. Bring out the eye bleach.

The weather is pretty much crap around here -- the humidity from the Atlantic makes its way down to here unimpeded, so it's sickly sticky and hot. The Med is not supposed to be humid; it's supposed to be the kind of place that, even if you had TB and no antibiotics, you could move here and live for another 30 years, the way people did before the invention of antibiotics. Well, even if you're perfectly healthy, you won't last long in Cannes.

The architecture is bland and without character. It's just multistory concrete buildings, oriented mostly away from the sea. There is a commercial street, Rue des Antibe, way far away from the water, and full of the kinds of stores you can find in any midscale mall. There is nothing appealing about shopping at any of them.

The place needs such a complete makeover. I did not meet anyone around here that I would consider anywhere near "nice." In fact, people seemed actively annoyed and unhelpful.
To add to the cacophony, there is constant helicopter traffic from the Nice airport to the Cannes marina. It's not sufficient to be an Important Person. You have to show to the world how important you are and how valuable your time is by helicoptering into this town. There is so much chopper noise that it's impossible to sail in peace off of Cannes.

Apparently, these flights from Nice actually cost only 110€, so you can
pretend to be important and make a lot of noise on a budget

There were a couple of interesting sights around town, so to be fair, I should mention them.

The stars have left their handprints on the main promenade. Some of these are cool.

Came across Belmondo's hand print

Cannes has excellent cafes and pastry shops.

Tasty

Came across a nice street market.

Cannes street market. Do not expect free tastings though.

So Cannes turned out to be one of these things that lots of people make a big deal about, but turn out to be not the least bit cool if you have any sense of taste. It reminded me of the time I was an undergrad on the east coast in the US, and all these snooty classmates would act all haughty about having "climbed all 13 4000 footers on the east coast." A 4000 footer is barely higher than a hill. They don't get names where I come from. There is no count of how many 4000 footers there are, and there certainly are no annoying people making a big deal of having been to any one or all of them. It's just not cool, unless you have no taste. Cannes is in the same category.

Left Cannes behind, hoping to never have to come back. If I win a Palm d'Or, and it'd have to be for "best background character accidentally filmed" or something like that, and I can't send someone else to pick up my award, I might be back. Until then, adieu!