The morning following dinner at Isabelle’s, I woke up super early to cook my asparagus and prosciutto dish and finish ironing my dress.  I met another member of the wine team at the train station around 11 to head to Isabelle’s.  When we got on the train it was packed, because of the Cannes Film Festival.  Luckily Cannes is only about ten minutes from Antibes, because managing my dress and my asparagus (which I was carrying in a dish my host mom had let me borrow, so I really didn’t want to break it) wasn’t easy standing amongst all those people.  When we got to Cannes, my friend and I were literally the only people who stayed in our car.

Isabelle has been hosting her “La Vie en Rosé” wine tasting party for 7 years, and every year she somehow manages to pick a day with perfect weather!  There were about twenty other women there, all members of her wine club.  As my friend and I helped Isabelle finish up in the kitchen with her potato, beet and radish salad, I talked to a Russian woman for a bit, who moved to France fairly recently and is looking for a translating job (she speaks French, Russian and English).  I loved the dish she brought, which she said was a Russian salad with a bit of a twist.  I’m not sure what defines a Russian salad, but I got her email so I can ask for the recipe.

We drank 10 different rosé wines during Isabelle’s dégustation (so not all of the ones in this picture!  Just some of them), each of which came from a different region in France.

First we filled the table with all the savory dishes people had brought.  While we ate, Isabelle came around and filled our glasses with rosé wines from a variety of regions in France.  We started with wines that were good on their own, as an apéritif, then moved to wines that were meant to complement a dish.  After that, we drank sweeter wines to go with the dessert.

The desserts were light and refreshing, perfect for a summer day: yoghurt with granola and strawberries, pink lemonade marshmallows, raspberry ice cream, two liquidy fruity mixtures (not sure what they were but they went well with the yoghurt!), and little pink candies.

My favorite dessert was the raspberry ice cream someone had made herself, but I tried a little bit of everything, of course 🙂

One of the last wines Isabelle had us taste had gold flakes in it!

After the wine tasting party ended, I went Cannes to watch the red carpet with a couple friends.  Going to Cannes during the Film Festival is a completely different experience from going to Cannes any other time of the year.  The whole place is buzzing, filled with people carrying expensive cameras with giant lenses, women in long ball gowns and men in tuxedos, tourists who dress up to pose as close to the red carpet as they can get…  My friends who were interning at the festival became regulars at a café called Coffee & Cookies.  The café has free wifi, good coffee and good smoothies, bagel sandwiches and huge salads.

This year was the 67th Cannes Film Festival.

Each day there are multiple red carpets, usually around 3, I think.  We watched the second red carpet for that night, for the movie The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby.

James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain!  See the stairs below the screen?  They eventually walked up there and we got a brief glimpse of them.

The following day I met Isabelle and one of her business partners to talk more about Femivin.  After the meeting (which included a delicious lunch), her business partner said he was headed to a cocktail party in Cannes, and asked if I’d like to come.  I’d planned on going to Cannes anyway to see if I could meet up with any of my friends who were interning there, so I said sure, why not!

The cocktail party was at an apartment with a balcony facing the red carpet, so while people talked business (everyone at this party was either buying or selling films), they could watch various film stars go in and out of the Palais.  I was happy to see that there were two girls there my age, who were interning for the woman who was hosting the party.  I was even more happy when one of my friends from my study abroad group showed up at the party, though.

At the cocktail party I saw Marion Cotillard leaving the Palais after the premiere of Two Days, One Night.

She’s in there somewhere, I swear!

In total, I made it to two parties during the Cannes Film Festival.  Just a couple nights before this cocktail party, Isabelle had called me to ask if I could go to dinner with her and a man who’s interested in investing in Femivin, because he didn’t speak French, so she was hoping I could translate.  Turns out the dinner was actually a party celebrating the release of a film at a villa up in the hills outside of Cannes.  The same villa my roommate had showed me pictures of that I’d looked at in awe just a few days before.  So again I was pleasantly surprised to see my roommate, as well as numerous other friends of mine who were interning at the festival.  My favorite part of the party was the dinner: hot dogs, chips and pasta salad.  I just couldn’t help but laugh to myself as I ate such a classic summer barbecue meal at a villa like that!