Drunk Monks: The Orval Abbey

Our visit to the Trappest Monk Monastery at Orval was very different.

The town with the train station nearest to Orval Abbey is called Florenville. This is a small town in Belgium on the border of France and the very strong French influence is immediately apparent.

When we jumped off the train at Florenville at about 5pm we figured we'd catch a taxi to our hotel a few km's down the road ... or not. Basically the only thing at the train station was the train station, all two platforms of it, and the conductor there didn't speak a syllable of english. There were two nice old people there who also didn't really speak any english (or german!) but after some serious sign language discussions with lots of hand movements (with a depressing "non" response to our "Taxi?" question) we finally thought we had some directions to follow to get to our hotel ... so with our bags (and my skis yet again) in tow, we headed off in the direction dictated by our sign language and hand movements discussion.

Surprisingly, after a 10 minute walk down the road following our "signed" directions we walked right up to our Hotel without any problems. Luckily for us the Hotel owner spoke perfect english and checked us in without problem. We opted in for the dinner and breakfast at the Hotel and were then shown up to our room. Now this is what I'm talking about! The Hotel room was phenomenal! It was a huge room on the top floor with skylight windows, a huge double bed and a massive lounge room. The bathroom was unbelievable with an enormous spa bath and a shower with 4, yep that's right folks, 4 different water nozzles that shoot out water in various different ways. I think it's the type of shower everyone should have in their house! =P

After we settled in, we decided to duck down to the bar and have a drink and a wander around. I grabbed a hot chocolate and Mariya ordered an Orval Abbey Beer, which came in an Orval Abbey Beer Chalice for good measure!

After our drinks we decided we'd head back to the Florenville train station and buy our tickets for our next leg on to Paris. We walked down to the station to have a chat with the ticket person ... which just so happened to be the station conductor we met an hour earlier that didn't speak a word of english ... Ok, this might not be so bad, surely even he could understand "Deux tickets to Paris merci" right? Wrong, no matter what we said all he did was keep shrugging his shoulders and saying "non, non, non". Well clearly this guy wasn't interested in helping us in the slightest, we'd need to come up with a new strategy later. Instead we decided to walk back to our hotel and walk around the little village a bit before heading into the restaurant for dinner.

Wow, the dinner was amazing. They weren't kidding when they said they did a good dinner. It was a set menu where everyone had the same meal, it was a small town restaurant afterall. For our starter we had an omelette with brie in the middle and a weird mango chutney on top, I know what you're thinking, it sounds very strange but it really worked. We then had a carrot soup, which once again sounds a bit epic fail but it was the best carrot soup I've ever had, possibly even the best one in the world. We were then onto our main course which was Roast Pork Minions with an onion gravy, a pear with cranberries and some mixed roast vegies. For dessert we had a really light strawberry fromage cake type thing which was completely awesome as well with a little cup of strawberry sorbet to top it off.

Dinner ended up taking almost 2 hours, we thought we were going to have an early night but ended up hitting the sack at about 11pm.

The next day we woke up and headed down for breakfast. It was the usual European continental breakfast that we've become acustomed to with toast, croissants, coffee and juice. We packed our bags, ducked down to reception to settle our bill and our Hotel owner offered to take us to the abbey.

We jumped in the car with the owner and an elderly couple who he was dropping to the station. The car was a really nice new Jaguar ... the first words out of the old guys mouth were "Jaguar <insert awesome french laugh>". So we dropped the older couple to the station and off to the Abbey we went.

The Orval Abbey was beautiful, but to put that in words simply doesn't do it justice. The  abbey there now is quite new, it was rebuilt after the First World War (french troops burnt the old abbey down in WWI). However, what you really go there to see are the ruins of the original Orval Abbey built in about 700 AD. While the Old Abbey ruins are just that, ruins, they have survived incredibly well over the last 1300 years. The Orval Monks have done an outstanding job at preserving the ruins and there are plaques throughout the self guided tour explaining the ruins and the lives of the monks and the people back in it's original time. We took literally hundreds of photos, and like usual these have gone up on Mariya's facebook page.

After a few hours wandering around the Abbey ruins our time was up and we had to jump a taxi back to Florenville. We were scheduled on the 12:45pm train out of Florenville to Paris via Brussels.

Next stop Paris, the land of the Frogs!