Advertisement
Published: August 18th 2011
Edit Blog Post
I’ll start in reverse, firstly
The Chavvy.
For those of you not familiar with the term chavvy or chav let me explain, there is no oxford dictionary definition but if there was it would go something like this.
Chav-a person who wears some type of imitation designer label shirt with the name of that label written over the shirt in the biggest writing possible so to let others know what they are wearing “a designer”, often accompanied with this is a baseball cap worn at 45 degrees of the angle it should actually be worn at and several items of cheap looking jewellery. Chavs are usually heard before they are seen as they are usually accompanied by some form of rap/hip hop music being played from their phone or if they are a more ‘up market’ chav the music will be played from their car, which has tinted windows & a ridiculously over powering sub to make it sound like their car is actually a night club. Chavvy is a term used when a person, people or an entire community behave in this manner.
Why am I telling you all this? Because next to the excavated site
of old Pompeii is the town of new Pompeii, the street surrounding the excavated sight and several streets running off of that are the borders of new Pompeii and these streets are infested with chavs. It is a real shame that somewhere with such history is almost completely ruined by its new inhabitants. We only stayed in Pompeii for two nights and our hotel was not situated on the main street but it was not far from it. All night long we were kept awake by chavs driving past in their cars playing loud music, every shop we looked in to seem to be selling the latest in chav fashion, now obviously this is just my opinion but based on what I saw whilst in New Pompeii I would not suggest visiting to anyone EVER!
The Bad.
Believe it or not the chavs were not the bad part of my trip to Pompeii. We stayed in the busy part of Pompeii so you would think there would be a lot of restaurants, or at least more than a handful, we found three. Three restaurants in a 10-15 minutes radius of our hotel! One was very nice but was
only open on the first night, one did not have English menus and when we asked the waiter if he could explain what certain things were on the menu he rolled his eyes and said he didn’t speak English at which point we got up and left and finally there was La Vinico, located on Via Roma aka Chav Street. When we walked in the waiter seemed very happy and helpful, we got our menus and picked what we wanted, after we ordered I noticed some other people had come in, they must have been locals as the waiter seemed to know them and spoke with them in Italian. Thirty minutes went by and we still hadn’t got our starters, the other people that had come in after us had now finished their meal and were talking to the waiter. Five minutes later we got our starter, Nikki’s was so bad she could not eat it (Nikki is from the north of England, it is practically against their entire belief system to leave food so it must have been bad), my starter was not what I had asked for but was adequate and as I was so hungry I was
ready to eat anything. After we finished our starter some more people came in who seemed to know the waiter, within 5 minutes they had their food in front of them, 30 minutes after I finished my starter I was still waiting for my main, the people that had come in AFTER our starter had now eaten and gone and I was still waiting for my main course, over an hour after we sat down I eventually got my main which was not what I had asked for, as he put the food on my table I asked for the bill and paid whilst I ate, I did not want to sit in the restaurant a second longer than I needed to.
Nikki regularly shouts at me for the tips I leave waiters in restaurants saying I leave too much (again, for people from the North of England it is in built not to give stuff away), only maybe twice in my life have I had a meal in a restaurant and not left a tip, this was the third time I had done this. This is without a doubt the worst service I had ever experienced in my
life and the food was barely edible.
And to finish the blog on a lighter note.
The Good.
When we arrived in Pompeii we went to our hotel to check in, it was quite late as we had just travelled from the north of Italy to the south on quite possibly the worst train journey ever (every time we passed through a tunnel my ears would pop and we must have passed through a million as my ears popped so many times it gave me the worst headache ever). As with almost all of the hotels we had stayed in during our honeymoon, with the exception of Venice, we were greeted with a bottle of prosecco to congratulate us, but when we arrived at our hotel, Albergo Iside, the person at reception gave us a try with two glasses and a small bottle of prosecco and said “This is for your Christmas”, obviously he was trying to say it was for our honeymoon but I wasn’t going to correct him, little things like that really add to a trip for me, it is actually one of the things that has made me smile most since we have
been on our honeymoon.
We waited too late to book our guided tour of Pompeii and all the group bookings were full so we had to book a private tour, which wasn’t cheap. We met our guide at 8:30 at the marina entrance to Pompeii, we practically had Pompeii to ourselves.....for about 20 minutes anyway. The private tour meant we didn’t have to wait for other people before moving on to the next building or should I say people didn’t have to wait for me to finish taking pictures before they could move on. A lot of the larger meeting areas of Old Pompeii were almost completely empty whilst we were there, it was quite eerie to see plaster casts of some of the people that had died in the eruption that buried Pompeii, including that of a pregnant woman and a dog writhing around on its back. Pompeii didn’t start getting busy for us until we got to the brothels, there was actually a queue to get in. There were erotic images on the walls and for people visiting Pompeii many years ago there are even street signs with genitalia on them to point you in the direction
of the brothels.
The ruins of Pompeii were probably the most amazing thing we visited during our honeymoon, the area the ruins cover is huge and although we spent hours there we only scratched the surface.
Would we visit again? Yes we would there was so much more to see, but unfortunately due to the new residents of Pompeii we will not be staying in Pompeii.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.238s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 38; qc: 138; dbt: 0.1365s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.5mb
D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
We love your blogs.
Dear Chris and Nikki, So good to see you on the front page again. The champagne photo with Vesuvius in the back ground. You have a good life. Dave and I both like to cook so the kitchen was of particular interest.