A learning moment while studying abroad occurred during my visit to Cannes, France. Located only 2.5-3 hours from Aix-en-Provence, Cannes is the world renown location of the Cannes Film Festival and vacation spot of some of earth’s wealthiest inhabitants. Unfortunately for me, I did not have this luxurious experience. Cannes had the worst rain it had in 30 years and there was a severe flood that killed 19 people in the area. Yes I am fine and was able to leave ok, but there were many traumatic events leading up to this.
Waking up at 7:30am to texts from my friends staying in another room that the train station was closed, no buses were running, and the highway was shut down was a great start to my morning. And so began being trapped in paradise. At first it was comical, no wifi was working, credit card machines and ATMs were not working, the hotel couldn’t swipe our credit cards to pay when we checked out, we didn’t have enough cash on us to eat a meal, we couldn’t get home, and yet it was such a beautiful day and the first day that we saw sunshine on our whole trip. So what did we do? We flocked to the only place that spoke English, the office of tourism. I was on the phone with my father at around 10:30am (4:30am in Tampa) once I realized the severity of the situation and used him as my google search engine since my cell reception wasn’t allowing me to connect to the Internet. All hotels were booked in Cannes if we stayed another night, no rental cars were available for us, once again couldn’t pay for anything since credit card and ATMs were not working, no mode of transportation out. Come 11am we all collectively started panicking realizing that we were actually stuck and had no other options. There is this service in Europe called “BlaBlaCar” which is basically like hitch hiking but on the same platform as Uber. So you pay €9 to get you from X location to Y location. Real cheap, kinda sketchy, but relatively safe. Our lack of the French language inhibited us to be able to understand the website or be able to “book” a car, but the people at the office of tourism were very helpful and assisted us, translated things for us, and even let us use their personal cell phones to contact the drivers of these cars. After a stress filled morning we finally found a way out and just hoped the highways would open up by the time we had to leave. Once it came time to meet our driver a few hours later, he picked us up at the meeting location and we were off. Driving through the neighboring towns you could tell the severity of the flood. Abandoned cars, cars on top of each other, storefronts all flooded, business throwing away inventory, carpets on the sidewalk, mud covered the streets and sidewalk. It was a disaster.
This was a tough situation to be in a country that you don’t speak the language and have to find your way out. We did play all of our options and we tried to stay relatively calm but we did learn how to help ourselves in an emergency with nobody else to rely on to fix the situation. Now looking back at this day, it was funny. For a place that boasts their 300 days of sunshine, we experienced none of it.
