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Published: April 15th 2009
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And so the journey continued...
The train from Stuttgart to Paris only took 4 hours - this was our introduction to the amazing train system in France! All the TGV trains are super speedy, and with our passes super cheap too! Very exciting after the doddery trans-siberian and all Europe's slow trains. Anyway we arrived in Paris with 40mins for the changeover, planning to metro-it quickly from the Gare de l'est to the Gare de Lyon, however without euro coins we had to queue for about 20mins to get to the ticket office, and with 15mins metro journey missed the connection. Even so, with 6 trains a day down to Montpellier we weren't too fussed, until we tried to reserve places and found out that the next trains were fully booked with people taking holidays, and we would have to wait until 2.30 that afternoon before we could get a train! Unfortunately, that meant that we missed all our further connections that day, and had to stop over in Montpellier before continuing to the Murphy house in Montblanc, a little village near Beziers.
So, we found a hostel in Montpellier after several false starts, our crappiest so far I'm glad
to tell you as we were beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about budget travel, all our hostels so far being lovely! So it was our first true experience of budget accommodation, complete with weirdy beardy guy doing weird things in the toilets, greasy-haired smoking french guys hanging round the corridors and uncomfortable beds 😊 excellent. Luckily it was only a short blip on the nice accommodation front, and we returned to the station the next morning to continue our journey south.
From Montpellier we got a local train to Beziers, and again got stumped as we couldn't find the bus stop to take us to Montblanc. In the end it was a gruelling, pack-laden 30min walk uphill into the town centre, where we managed to board a bus to Montblanc. When we turned a corner and the view opened in front of us, James could no longer contain his excitement and yelled out "I CAN SEE THE CHATEAU!!!" apparently a Murphy family tradition, slightly lost on us 3 and the rest of the bus' passengers however! We walked the final 15mins from the village to the house, a cosy ground floor flat just behind a beautiful
chateau being used as a home for disabled people. We knocked on the door of Madame Gomez, the housekeeper, and after some initial stumblings in my rusty french managed to explain that this tall, shaven-haired boy WAS in fact the same James Murphy she knew from a few years back, and we got the keys to get in.
The house was a littly bit cobwebby having been empty for a while, and so we spent the first couple of days sweeping, cleaning, hoovering and washing until everything was beautifully shiny. THe main thing we couldn't believe was the weather - from the first day we had the French doors open onto the patio, sunbathing, sunglasses wearing, sun cream slathering, too hot for trousers sort of weather - bliss! We had a week here, and got into a good routine. We'd wake up around 9ish, walk into the village to get fresh bread, vegetables to make into soup for lunch, and something else to make for dinner. We'd then eat, sunbathe, read magazines and books, have lunch, go for a walk around the vineyards, or along the river, or go and feed Pomme the horse at the chateau our apple
cores, then return to the sunbathing and reading until dinner, eat, chill and sleep 😊 it was exactly the break we all needed from the hectic city hopping we'd been doing.
One of the evenings we made a fire in the BBQ and roasted marshmallows, sitting and talking and laughing hysterically (aided by a bottle of wine) until we were falling asleep. Another day we had an adventurous walk along the river, Mim launching her plastic-bottle-and-paper-sailed boat which promptly sank, and discovered a hut made out of bamboo that someone had built as a summer hideout. That afternoon, when we returned from our walk, I saw something wriggling under the cushion covers on the floor, so (climbing onto a chair just in case) I told the others who turned the covers over and discovered a snake! It was about 30cm long, green and brown, and it wriggled very quickly into a hole in the wall behind the radiator, where it had clearly been living before we so rudely disturbed it. After hastily checking with Mme Gomez that they were safe, we spent the rest of the day attempting to photograph it and shush it outside. The next day, it
had gone 😞
The garden was lovely, all green with tulips and irises blooming everywhere, and Mme Gomez told us in intricate detail of the pears and plums the trees produce in the autumn, "more than i can eat, they just rot on the ground!" she exclaimed. At one end was a bamboo thicket (hahahah mum!) which James decided to turn his practical hand to, making a set of wind chimes, a windmill, and most excitingly a chess set from the bamboo, as we had all become slightly obsessed with chess since staying in Stuttgart, and also badly needed an alternative form of entertainment than scrabble, which was becoming the point of some heated arguments about whether 'phelleo' (pronounced fellow) or similar, were words as we had no dictionary.
One evening after dinner we discovered that the glasses did that thing where you rub your finger round the rim and they hum, and so we made an impromptu musical performance and video-ed it. to be honest it sounded crap, but made us giggle lots anyway. 😊
On Sunday, our last proper day, we spent the day tidying up and putting everything back where it came from, washed
all the sheets and cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms in preparation for our early morning departure the next day. We had a slight issue with rubbish, as we were leaving before the next rubbish collection day and I didnt understand what Mme Gomez was saying (possibly because she kept going off on a tangent about pears...) about what we should do with it, so the next morning we attempted to put our bin bags in with the chateau's, but failed as we couldnt find them, and eventually found a dump where we left them. We then had to walk very quickly into the town to get the 7.20am bus back to Beziers, where we headed back to Montpellier, then on to Paris where we again had a slight misfortune with the trains, as seemingly everything was fully booked to anywhere. We had planned to get a night train to Vienna and change there to Budapest, but as this wasn't possible instead we had to head back to Munich by night train. We shared our carriage with a friendly young Austrian guy called Martin and slept fitfully taking turns at stretching out on the floor!
We arrived in the morning,
got breakfast at Burger King (haha yes I know...) and then got onto a PAINFULLY slow long boring train to Budapest. We were all completely knackered, and got bored very quickly. In the end mim resorted to drawing colourful scenes on our hands and feet in felt pens - i got a vegetable patch on one foot, a seaside scene on the other, and a party all up my arm 😊 finally, we arrived in Budapest and bundled off the train ready to begin city sight-seeing again.
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HANNAH
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Lilly feeding the horse reminded me SO much of ginger! Do you remember? And we always had to hold our hands so so flat hahah GOOD TIMES. Also love the windchimes and chess pieces. WHAT is bamboo doing in France?!! Also LOVE the photo 'James and a random bloke. Oh wait! It's Lilly!'. No hilar antics from me today I'm afraid, very busy with revision. Hahah. Haa. Lots of love xxxx