Today I went to Cannes. It’s been over a year since I’ve returned to this little place. It was nice to walk around the streets where I’ve had so many memories. While living in the south of France, it was the place I always went to sit by the beach and let go of my worries for a little while because it was the easiest to access by bus. It was actually the first place I had stayed the night, all those years ago when I had arrived on a late night train. My experience there tonight was very different to my experience over 3 years ago.
I remember arriving after 10pm one night in November in 2020. It was incredibly quiet, all I could hear were the seagulls. They are quite big over here, compared to the seagulls I’m used to… and they cry in the same way the crow cries in Australia. I exited the station and walked up a steep hill towards my accommodation, a small apartment in a complex nearby. That was a short night, because the next morning the cries of the seagulls and the faint light of sunrise woke me up early. I peaked out of the small balcony, and for the first time I was able to really see the streets.
It was not what I expected France to look like… rectangular boxes of pale apartment buildings, with colourful window shutters and slanting red rooves. Some of the apartments had little balconies with curved railings, there was some ornamental elements to the walls, but the residences were mostly simple. The distance between the apartment and the bus stop was not long, so I did not get to see the shoreline. However, as the bus climbed slowly uphill, towards Valbonne, I looked out the window and I couldn’t believe what I saw. Green hills, dotted with apartment buildings and houses, big and small. The nature was rugged, not the usual smooth curves of farmland that I had associated so much with France in the past.
This was completely different, and I remember thinking while I was riding in that bus… what am I doing here? I had randomly chosen the location without doing any research, and I started to wonder whether I had made the right choice. I had loved travelling around the Loire Valley, the countryside of the southwest of France, in 2019… the south east seemed nothing like what I had experienced at that time.
Walking around the same places now… I realise that this sense of wonder has gone a little. I now walk these streets as if I have always lived here, but of course I haven’t. This was all once so new to me, and today I noticed once again that I had become jaded to all the beauty that this region had to offer. I had become tired… and perhaps I was in need of taking some time to rediscover a sense of newness.
Your environment only has the appearance of staying the same, but yet everything changes. My walk around Cannes today reawakened me to why I love photography, and inspired me to take a little more time to look around. I truly believe, that if you look slowly enough and for long enough you will always find something new. A new story or a new perspective. I knew it was time for me to take some space alone and find new corners within the home I thought I knew.
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