I’m back! It feels like I’ve been gone for years. I’m sure you all feel the same way. Hugs all around and roll on the recap.
London had a bad spot of fog round Christmas (which everyone acted all shocked about – HELLO, this is LONDON, there is so much fog here they named a jacket after it), bringing flight departures to a virtual halt in every airport except Luton. Luckily, to save money we’d chosen to fly to Nîmes rather than direct to Montpellier, which meant that instead of departing from Stansted we’d be flying from…Luton! Hooray! SiC and I and our two friends got to the airport in good time and the flight proceeded without incident, unless you count my getting slightly drunk as an ‘incident’, though it is even more statistically probable than London being foggy.
This turned out to be the last bit of transport luck we’d have for the entire trip.
Arriving at Nîmes, we debated whether to take a taxi into town (several were waiting at the taxi rank) or save money and take the shuttle bus. We decided to be practical, paid our 20 Euros and boarded the bus. The sign at the bus stop had indicated that the shuttle departed every 15 minutes. We waited for over half an hour, enduring the piped-in French pop music (one song was so awful it caused all of us to spontaneously start sniggering in unison), and then started to get a bit impatient. The driver wasn’t even on board the bus – he was standing off in the distance, smoking a cigarette (natch) and peering at the runway. In typical French fashion, no announcement was made as to the cause of the delay, and nobody else seemed bothered by it.
We debated amongst ourselves, and being the only one who could speak decent French I was elected (read: forced) to go ask the driver when the bus would leave. In response to my query, he shrugged philosophically and said there was some sort of problem with the baggage unload from the latest plane. He didn’t know when everything would get going again. When I relayed this news, I was asked (FORCED!) to get our money back so we could take a taxi. The driver rolled his eyes when we asked if we could get a refund and retrieve our luggage, but soon we were on our way to the taxi rank.
Which was conspicuously devoid of taxis. So we waited. SiC went to look for an information desk inside the airport. It was closed. We waited some more. The bus driver smoked some more and watched us wait. We got cold. No taxis arrived. Eventually the baggage problem was (presumably) solved, a few more people straggled onto the bus, and the driver prepared to leave.
“Should we go back?”
“Fuck it. I’m not asking him if we can get back on and that’s final.”
We stood shivering at the taxi rank, staring longingly at the warm bus, until the driver shouted over to us that we could get back on if we wanted. We gratefully loaded our baggage under the bus and boarded rather sheepishly.
From Nîmes we caught the train to Agde, which was crammed with screaming teenagers and delayed in Montpellier for nearly half an hour. By the time we managed to find a taxi in Agde, we were all getting a bit tetchy. When we finally got to the house in Marseillan it was cold enough inside to store meat, as the boiler hadn’t been on in over a week. We had no choice but to turn to alcohol for survival, and despite everything we ended the evening in good spirits.
On Christmas Eve we made a day trip to Montpellier, which was lovely and charming as ever, and which featured a guy advertising “Free hugs” on the main shopping drag. We even managed to find the little bar we’d gone to on our last trip, where some sort of raucous impromptu Karaoke event was unfortunately taking place.
Christmas was pleasant but uneventful: we discovered that the local bar was open all day (hooray!) and spent most of the afternoon getting drunk and taking multi-burst photos of each other making stupid faces. All in all, the French leg of our trip was pretty laid back and relaxing.
Our friends were scheduled to leave on the 27th. They were flying back out of Nîmes, and they left themselves loads of time in the morning to catch the train and get a taxi to the airport. The internet connection at the house was down so we couldn’t check train times, but on previous days there had seemed to be a departure pretty much on the hour.
We got to the station around 9.30, and I was designated (sigh) to buy tickets. I asked the bored-looking fat bloke in the ticket office when the next train was leaving for Nîmes. “11.10,” he said.
Commence panic. Apparently trains only run on the hour during peak times, after which they run when they damn well please. I asked if there was an earlier connecting service in Montpellier. “Non.” I asked if there was ANY OTHER WAY to get to Nîmes before 11.30. At this point the clerk was obviously disgusted with me and my petty English problems. “Non.”
Our friends had no choice but to take a taxi to Nîmes, costing them over 100 Euros. SiC and I spent the day in Sęte and Béziers feeling mildly guilty, although there wasn’t really anything we could have done. I trod in dog shit as a sort of subconscious atonement. Then I went and tracked it into a cathedral (just to confirm my status of totally fucking damned), where I took a picture of Jesus making the same expression Thierry Henry makes when he’s contesting a penalty decision. Ah, the French.
The day before we thought we were supposed to leave for Barcelona (note the wording of that last phrase), we happened to pop into an internet café in the morning just to confirm arrangements.
I was checking my e-mails when SiC said, “Uh…what’s the date today?”
“The 29th.”
“And what day are we meant to go to Barcelona?”
“The 30th…right?”
“Nope. The tickets are booked for today.”
“Shit!”
Commence panic part deux. We still had plenty of time to make it to the station, but there was all our cleaning and packing to do, plus we needed to get some more cash. I stopped at the cashpoint and tried to take 200 Euros from our joint account. No luck. This meant we had drastically overestimated our liquidity (as usual). This was not good.
I threw everything into my suitcase and went to find the train tickets. And…no train tickets. I had lost the fucking train tickets. This was most definitely not good. Also, when SiC checked our arrival date at the rental flat, it wasn’t until the 30th, the day after our arrival. NOT FUCKING GOOD AT ALL. It’s a good thing we’re not travel agents, I dare say.
At the train station we were informed that our tickets could not be replaced, but that we could get new ones for the same price. We were given a form to fill out, which we could send in for a refund on the original tickets (good news, but we wouldn’t receive the money for three weeks – not immediately helpful).
We got to Montpellier fine and boarded our train, which looked as if it had been built in a bygone era to transport cattle through a war zone. The interior was clean, grim and functional; somehow reminiscent of a Communist hospital. Admittedly though, the seats were way comfortable, and the beer was fucking cheap, though the alcohol did not stop me from being a raging cranky bitch for the entire journey, especially when the train ground to a halt in the middle of nowhere for half an hour (“What, are they switching donkeys?”).
We arrived in Barcelona at 10.30 in the evening with very little money and no place to stay for the night, as we hadn’t been able to reach the owner of the flat to ask if we could check in a day early. THANK GOD the first hotel we found had a vacancy. We checked in, dumped our luggage and headed out to get drunk.
Whereupon things looked up, remarkably. SiC has a friend in Barcelona who runs a bar. He gave us the address, and we stopped at a bar near the hotel to bolster our strength and ask directions. We asked the bartender if he knew where the Plaza George Orwell was. He shook his head and walked away. I was all set to be annoyed at his indifference when he returned with a street directory. He looked up the address and opened it to the right page, and then he proceeded to find a piece of paper and draw us an painstakingly detailed map, with all major landmarks noted. He explained the route to us street by street, making sure we understood. Bless his cotton socks! I kept the map to remind me that not all foreigners are filthy rotten bastards. (I need help sometimes.)
We walked through the Gothic district, which was full of funky shops and restaurants, stylish young people and an enticing aroma of pot. We found the bar, where we were enthusiastically greeted by SiC’s friend and emphatically not allowed to pay for a single drink all night. Things got a little hazy after our second round of Mojitos, but I vaguely remember befriending an American couple who were very patient while I ranted about softwood lumber. Heh.
The next day we finally managed to track down the owner of our rental flat, who agreed that we could check in early. We thanked the god of hangovers and jumped in a cab for what should have been a ten-minute cab ride, which somehow stretched into forty minutes, with the driver offering incomprehensible explanations in Spanish as to why he couldn’t take a direct route. I think they probably amounted to, “I want your money, stupid gringos.”
At last we met the owner of the flat, who helpfully lugged my suitcase up eighty flights of stairs into the tiny flat, and then unhelpfully asked for more money than we’d originally been told, and then did an uncanny impression of Manuel from Fawlty Towers when we tried to disagree. “You pay me,” he repeated, pointing at a piece of paper with a figure printed on it. “You pay me.” Eventually his Spanish logic and our punishing hangovers wore down our resistance and we handed over the requested amount just to get rid of him.
To say the flat was poky would be an insult to Gumby’s horse. We’d rented it so that we could save money by cooking for ourselves. This looked like it might prove difficult as the ‘kitchen’ consisted of two small burners, with no microwave or stove. The TV was about three inches across, with four channels in Spanish and no DVD player. We also soon found out that the mattress was actually a block of cement with a sheet over it, and that the shower only generated about a teaspoonful of hot water, leaving us almost enough time to wash our hair before having to leap out of the freezing spray screaming obscenities. However, from our balcony (well, more like a window with a fence in front of it) we could look down on a lovely building site and a colourful array of hookers.
That’s enough for today, I think. Coming up next time: football pickpockets!