Our hotel in Cannes, France was attached to a McDonald’s, and it was here that my traveling companion and partner in crime, Emma, and I pondered whether we were being too “miserly,” as her father put it, with our money and that maybe next time we should pay an extra few euros for a place to stay that wasn’t also home to the Big Mac.

But it wasn’t just the Golden Arches that lent a general feeling of tackiness to our temporary living space. In fact, our first concern was the fact that the hotel was in a location surrounded by billboards and empty, sun-baked parking lots. It was distinctly un-European.

So, when we entered a tiny, musty room with grimy carpets, a door that did not lock, lights that did not work and a broken shower, we weren’t all that surprised.

This was not the classy Cannes known for its upscale beaches and glamorous film festival, although we did see that part of Cannes during our visits to the downtown area – a place rife with designer stores and expensive cafes frequented by celebrities.

Multiple times, we felt ourselves experiencing the contrast between the elegance of a city and the not-so-sophisticated lifestyle we led as backpackers.

The day before we arrived in Cannes, we spent a few nights in Nice, France – known for its popularity as a vacation destination.

As Emma puts it, “If the stereotype of the rude Frenchman is inaccurate, all the other supposed clichés are true.”

We were shocked to find that no one in the south of France seems to be employed, at least not in any other capacity than espresso-drinkers and croissant-tasters. It all seemed very luxurious to us in our search for cheap food and free fun.

One late afternoon in Nice, Emma and I each brought a croissant (a staple in the diet of penny-pinching, nomadic backpackers) back to our communal hostel kitchen. Still hungry, we lucked upon a half-empty bag of pasta someone had left on the counter. We took it upon ourselves to assume that no one would claim this pasta and decided to use it for dinner.

We were feeling pretty good about our thriftiness until a fellow hostel dweller came in to begin work on his masterpiece of a sandwich.

He was amused by our basic meal and offered us a half-empty package of cheese, but I reassured him that we were not, in fact, starving, and that we’d be fine without it.

However, when he proceeded to throw the perfectly good cheese away and leave the kitchen, I was too shocked and too set in my resourceful ways to not retrieve the securely wrapped cheese from the rubbish bin – I firmly believe in the 5-second rule.

Emma had to suppress a laugh when the disposer of the cheese walked back into the kitchen and caught me grabbing it from the garbage.

Although we were enjoying our, at times, pitiable situation, our families and friends began to worry about us. More than that, they wondered how we could be having any fun at all while we trekked around on foot and hopped on busses, ate very little food and stayed in rooms with multiple foreign strangers.

We often laughed at our attempt to explore the ritzy south of France on such low funds. But despite the occasional hunger pang or moments of frustration in trying to navigate French train maps, we were having the time of our lives.

The fun, I think, comes with the liberation of carrying almost nothing and of knowing almost no one in a particular area. We felt like observers in the most extreme sense of the word. By living in this nomadic style, we were able to watch the daily energies of each city unfold before us.

We would not have experienced that had we disconnected our perspective of the cities by staying in upscale hotels or continuously dining in fine restaurants.

So, instead of involving ourselves in the glamour of Cannes or the conspicuous wealth of Monaco, we were able to sit back and take in the bizarrely pristine sights, occasionally dotted with a McDonald’s.

Contact Annie Sciacca at [email protected]