Jasmine A.
Yelp
Wanting to ensure we arrived in time for the English tour, my sister and I checked the website before our visit to confirm the time. We arrived with plenty of time before the tour was to begin, only to discover, too late, that the tour had already started, half an hour before the posted time!
We asked why the time had changed and were told that they change the tour times in April. That's fine, but it was April 3, and we pointed out that the website had not been updated with the new times. We were incredibly unimpressed and pissed off--not wanting to waste time, as we had other things we wanted to do that day, we had specifically timed our arrival at the castle to catch the English tour, but now we were in the very situation we had tried to avoid--having to wait for quite some time for the next tour. Because we now had nearly hour until the casemates tour at 12:30pm, we decided to grab some lunch. We went into a small cafe on the castle grounds, and it was a very strange, almost uncomfortable, experience.
We entered the cafe, and at first we weren't sure if it was even open--no one appeared to be in there, and we exited and then entered again, and finally, after 5 to 10 minutes, a woman came out of what I presume to be the kitchen. The woman was quite odd and despite being able to speak and understand English, she was having difficulty answering simple questions such as, "What kind of meat is in the soup?" We both ordered the soups on offer (I ordered the potato soup, as she couldn't give me a definite answer about the kind of meat in the other soup), and while the soup was good, it took well over 20 minutes for her to serve the soup. We were the only customers in the cafe, and perhaps the long wait was because they had just opened and didn't have the soup heated up, I don't know, but it was a ridiculously long wait for soup. The wait was so long that despite having more than enough time for a quick lunch, we didn't have enough time to finish our meal, and we were nearly late for the casemates tour!
The tour guide hosting the casemates tour was absolutely terrible, and we couldn't understand a word he was saying because he was such a mumbly mush mouth, and sounded like a recovering stroke victim. So after wasting our time waiting an hour for this tour we left after five minutes, and decided to skip the castle tour, which is the tour we had originally come for.
I would have given the castle four or five stars, but the lying website and terrible tour guide really soured the experience. (If the castle grounds weren't so beautiful, I would actually give this review two stars!) I do recommend visiting the castle, but don't trust the website for tour times, and don't waste your time going on the tour.