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Published: June 24th 2007
Welcome to Naples
Where the people are trashier than the streets! This weekend was pretty darn fun. On Friday morning, we left and piled into a bus and drove to Pompeii to take a tour of the ruins. As you know, I was really looking forward to this because I had studied a lot about Pompeii in high school because the Latin courses we take are based on characters who live in Pompeii.
Anyways, we decided to take a tour through Naples first, which we were advised was going to be interesting. To quote Rick Steves (a well-known tour guide publisher), "with Sardena an hour away from Naples, I don't know why you'd ever spend the night there, but, if for some reason you have to, here's a list of hotels." Another thing he suggests is to "watch the traffic cops try to enforce traffic laws. It's almost comical." One of our professors also told us that a popular Italian saying is "Once you visit Naples, you know you can die." Anyways, Grandma Marj, you'll be happy to know that the outbreak of Dengue fever you warned me about originated in Naples. I took a picture to illustrate why.
Once we drove through Naples, we were on our way
Pompeii Theater
Pink Floyd was the first band to rock the house here in over 2000 years to Pompeii, which is difficult to describe because it was so cool. I took lots of pictures, some of which I'm posting on here with descriptions. The best part, though, was seeing a perfectly preserved house. It was covered in original frescos from over 2000 years ago. The crazy thing, however, was what our tourguide told us as we entered the house. He's lived in Pompeii for his entire life and worked at the ruins for 20 years. The house we entered has been closed for as long as he can remember, and they had finally opened it 3 days before we visited. Talk about timing! Other interesting stops were the town arena (where Pink Floyd played in the mid '70s) and the town brothel (which also had some "interesting" frescos, but aren't PG for this blog. Sorry!)
Yesterday, we visited the island of Capri, which was also really fun. The highlight of that trip was taking a chairlift to the very top of the highest point, which was absolutely spectacular. The views were breathtaking. Everyone went with us and we took a really good group picture from the top. The guy who took it for us was French,
and asked us where we were from. We told him America, and as he took the picture he said "Everyone say Freedom Fries!" and we all started laughing.
Even though it was a really fun weekend, I'm happy to be back to Rome. We start class again tomorrow, and though it's going to be hard to transition from wild drunken vacation to school that quickly, I'm kind of looking forward to spending this weekend relaxing and working on school. Next weekend we are going to Siena, Florence, Pisa, and Viareggio (which is supposedly this really cool beach town), so I always have that to look forward to....
Ciao!
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rinjay
non-member comment
dearest jeffrey, i am glad you are having such a good time.. i'm looking forward to hearing more about pompeii and all, since i too have spent three precious years of my life studying latin. hopefully you purchased some "cool roman coins" to cross the river styx. haha..anyways, keep up with the blogs broha. and post more pictures!! oh so mom and i have been watching entourage and its pretty good.. i think its safe to say we are hooked. its funny though because every time dad walks in the room multiple "f-bombs" are dropped and he freaks out. by the way i've been driving your car. muahaha ok byeee! xoxox