Friday's toilet scenario

Friday, May 10^th 2013

It was a good job we gave our feet a rest last night as we spent most of our day in Cannes walking. I loved Cannes and I even got to wear my anorak. We had to take a tender from the ship to the port and I thought that it would be cold / windy. It was actually warm and draught free but I was still pleased to be able to wear my anorak.

In terms of High Things to Go Up, Cannes tempted us with the Super Cannes observatory. However, it was not obvious how far away this was, or how we would reach this and we weren’t really tempted by a possibly time consuming detour to the tourist information to find out; plus it was looking like a bit of a hazy so may not even have been worth the trek even if we had tried. We could see it up a hill; today’s touristical map did at least have a scale but no isobars. It looked like the walk might be about 5 km but there was no obvious pedestrian route marked and with no road names marked either it would be a bit risky.

Instead, we started the morning with a promenade around La Croisette – taking numerous detours to gawp at the super yachts. It really was something to see them in situ, rather than at a boat show. I don’t’ think that I believed that anyone actually bought them before. But here they were. And people were polishing them; they were polishing the insides of cupboards. When I say people I think it must have been “staff” – apparently it costs at least €1 million to run one of these things each year. We enjoyed posing with our favourite Bond Villain-esque vessels.

 

We also amused ourselves by looking in the yacht agents’ windows – a variation on the more common touristical activity of looking in estate agents’ windows (we did that too). We will not be buying a super yacht any time soon (nor a villa on the Côte d’Azur for that matter). Maybe we exuded an air of the luxury yacht type though as a man on the quayside seemed to think that we could do with some luxury transfers – private jet anyone?

Now Matt was getting rather keen to use the toilet. He followed the sign to the sanitaires in the marina, while I perched under a palm tree and wrote a postcard. Next thing I knew my phone was ringing – Matt sounded panicked: the sanitaires had been locked, he’d found another set of loos but these were shut for another half an hour and I was nowhere in sight. Things were clearly getting desperate. I was time I took charge of the situation. I found Matt and offered words of encouragement about the quality of his bladder while we took the scenic route through the rose garden to another WC that I had located on the touristical map.

Nature report 2

• Cannes is pleasingly free of seagulls. There are quite a few pigeons but they are fairly inoffensive pigeons – one was taking a bath.
• I spotted 2 lizards today. I always find this quite exciting, something I think that I have inherited from my dad.
• With less than a week to go until the Cannes Film Festival preparations were in full swing. Notably this involves bolstering the already plentiful palm trees, with the installation of many more on the beach. We saw a demonstration of how this involves cranes and badly driven diggers. I wonder what they do with all the extra palm trees when the festivities are over.
• There were lots of bottle brush plants. Apparently they’re poisonous (I seem to remember my mum warning me of this when I was little, even though I don’t think I had a propensity to eat random plants).
• Based on a highly unscientific study, the Yorkshire terrier appears to be the most popular breed of dog in Cannes

We found the WC to be a hi-tech toilet booth. There were four people in front of us in the queue: 2 friends (they looked local) and a couple (they looked Northern Europeans). It was a slow throughput at the hi-tech toilet booth as between each use it was disinfected, washed and dried. You did however get up to 20 minutes in the hi-tech toilet booth when it was your turn – which would potentially mean a very long wait for Matt.

The hi-tech toilet booth finished its cleansing cycle from the previous visitor and one of the friends went in. For some reason (optimism probably) I thought that the other friend didn’t need to visit the hi-tech toilet booth; but I was wrong. Friend 2 went in after another cleansing cycle. I spent a while pondering who of my friends I would be prepared to share a hi-tech toilet booth with. Quite a few probably – it was a spacious hi-tech toilet booth.

After another cleansing cycle the girl of the Northern European couple went in – we would be next. But no; the boy of the Northern European couple was also going to use the hi-tech toilet booth.

After witnessing a total of 5 cleansing cycles, it was finally our turn to use the hi-tech toilet booth. And a great 50 cents’ worth of hi-tech toilet booth it was too. I must say that there are worse places to queue for a toilet: there were shade and sun options and we saw at least 3 trains go over a bridge just over the road.