Napoli & Pompeii

Saturday we went to the ruins of Pompeii. It was about a 45 minute Metro train ride from Naples to Pompeii on the junkiest underground train ever.  All the guides I'd read said this place was rampant with pickpocketers.  So, I was in a state of mild panic everytime somebody came near us.  Spencer still makes fun of me for asking him every 10 minutes if he still had his phone and his wallet, but I think being stranded in Naples without either of those things would have been super crappy.

We spent most our rainy day wandering around the ruins of Pompeii, which were really cool. When we first got there, we encountered the old "city center" which was mostly destroyed by the volcano, Mount Vesuvius. The city center was so destroyed it left us a little disappointed, thinking we'd just be walking around a bunch of old rocks with a pillar here or there. As we wandered around more, we found buildings that were much more intact and interesting. All the ceilings and upper floors of buildings are gone but we could still see doorways and walls of the ground floors making up the street blocks.  

Pompeii's "colosseum"

While you're in Pompeii, you can pay for a guided tour, which may be worth it.  But if there's one thing we learned about ourselves during our travels, it's that we're total cheapskates.  So, we went for the self-guided audio tour and map.  It's less interesting, but it got the job done.  Plus, if you get lucky, you can stumble upon other tour groups and just listen to their tour guide for a little while.  Spencer's particularly fond of doing this with Mandarin Chinese groups because they'd never suspect him of eavesdropping ;).  

A shop front, the counter is still beautiful and intact!

The high sidewalks were built so people walking on the street didn't get splattered by the muck in the streets.  If you look carefully, you can also see the wheel grooves in the street. 

Wheat grinders in a bakery

Some of the other cool parts were the obviously visible store fronts, bakery ovens and wheat grinders, courtyards with their ponds, and the Roman baths. It's pretty incredible to see how advanced these people were for their time, especially compared to the less advanced things we saw in England that had happened centuries later.   One thing I found really cool were the ruts in the stones of the streets from carts back in 89 AD! Of course one of the other highlights, though the saddest part, were the plaster casts they made of the victims from their final moments.

We asked some little kids to take this picture...it turned out great and you can't really tell that we're trying to give them instructions and hoping they won't drop our camera!

The Temple of Jupiter.  And if you look really hard behind us, you can see the outline of Mount Vesuvius.

A view from above 

After Pompeii, we caught the train back to Naples. Naples is the place where pizza was invented, so of course we had to get a pizza! We read reviews online and found a busy place near our hotel, and got some really good pizza. We just split a pizza which was plenty of food for Spencer, and more than I could eat. Everyone around was getting a full pizza and eating the whole thing themselves, even young kids! Crazy! 

Sunday, our final day of tourisitng, was much less successful. Our original plans of the Amalfi Coast or catacombs didn't work out, so in the end, we decided to just walk around the city center of Naples for a little bit. This was completely unsuccessful. Naples is a disgusting place (did I already say that??). Our guide books said you have to look past the grime and graffiti of Naples to see the hidden gem, but I just couldn't look past it. There was garbage everywhere. Everywhere. I saw one mom helping her little boy pee in the street and people weren't really into picking up their dog poop, so I ended up spending most the time watching my feet to make sure I didn't step in anything nasty. 

Naples

This is a homeless man that lived between our hotel and the train station. He just sat here all day with all his garbage (...and other unmentionables on the wall) around him.  It was a lovely first impression when we arrived.

After about 90 less enjoyable moments of wandering, Spencer suggested we just go back to the train station and sit, because that'd be more fun than this. I gratefully accepted. So we went to the train station and literally just sat and people watched. And it was better. Later in the day, we caught a train from Naples to Rome, another train to the airport area, and found our hotel.

The next morning we flew back to London.  We spent the afternoon eating one last yummy lunch, taking pictures of the High Street by our house, buying some treats to take home and share, and locking up our flat one last time. We rode the Underground to Heathrow where we stayed in a shady hostel and listened to jets fly right over our heads all night.  The next morning we were up bright and early to begin our long flights home.

Saying good-bye to the London Underground

Waiting for our last train on the way to our hostel by the Heathrow Airport

I am still so sad that our once-in-a-lifetime adventure came to an end. Naples wasn't the best place to end, but we had so many amazing experiences and saw so many fantastic places, I can't really complain.

Roma Capitale

Wednesday (January 1st) we decided to go to the colosseum first to beat the rush, but it was closed because of the holiday (1 of 3 days in the whole year it's closed!). So we ended up walking around a bunch of the ruins of the old Roman Forums, to the Pantheon, getting more gelato, and seeing the Trevi Fountain. As the day went on. the crowds got thicker and thicker. We never experienced crowds like that anywhere else in our entire 5 months in Europe. It was like the density of walking out of a Jazz game everywhere we went. If it were the beginning of our travels I think we would have tried to endure, but after 3+ weeks of touristing, our patience had run thin. So we went back to our hotel to make dinner and watch Roman Holiday and eat our New Years cake that had been in every grocery store in Italy for the holidays.

Trevi Fountain

The Pantheon from 126 AD (crazy!)

Misc ruins

More ruins

The Colosseum - attempt 1

Thursday, we woke up, ate our Cheerios, and went straight to the Colosseum to find a HUGE line. We decided to revamp our plan and got on the Metro to the Vatican City instead. We got to the Vatican with about 20,000 other people (but really, that's how many people visit per day during high season) and decided to start with the Vatican Museums which include the Sistine Chapel. On our way there, a lady started telling us about a guided tour which would get us straight into the museums with a tour guide, then would get us straight into St. Peters Basilica without waiting in the line, which was a 3 hour wait according to her. We were sold. We both agree it was worth it, our tour guide pointed out lots of things we wouldn't have noticed or appreciated and gave us a lot of background info about the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel was amazing to see and was definitely a highlight of the day. Pictures aren't really allowed but we did snap a crappy selfie (see below).

After the Sistine Chapel, our tour guide led us straight to St. Peters where the tour itself ended but skipped the line. We spent an hour or two wandering around the MASSIVE church (I think I read it's the 2nd biggest in the world). The detail and extravagance of the place was unbelievable. Every inch is covered in some form of carving, painting, or monument. There's one part of the chapel where the say Peter himself is buried, which I didn't know before. One other crazy part of the Vatican was St. Peter's Square. That place is huge! When you see picture of all the people gathered together there, that is a LOT of people.

St Peter's Square

St Peter's Basillica

After the Vatican, we walked to the Spanish Steps. I'm not really sure why they're so famous, they just are. It's the place Audrey Hepburn sits and eats gelato in Roman Holiday if you've seen that (we’d just watched it, so it made them a little more interesting.) We took  pictures with the steps, then found a place to eat. We had a roman roasted artichoke, then Spencer had another pasta and I had veal with roasted potatoes, which was really good right up until Spencer told me what veal was (poor lambs :(). My food was slow to cook so they brought us another appetizer while we waited, bonus! We also made our way back to the Trevi Fountain to throw our coins in and take a few more pictures. On our way to the Trevi Fountain we got conned into buying a rose from a street vendor.

Friday we got up, packed, checked out of our hotel, and went back to the Colosseum (for the 4th time!). Don't worry, we were more successful this time. The line was actually far worse that day than it had been the day before. Luckily, I read a trick online: The ticket for the Colosseum is good for the interior of the Colosseum as well as Palatine Hill and the Roman Forums. I read the best option is to buy your tickets at the Forum and do that first, and then you can pretty much walk into the Colosseum. So we did that, we still had to wait in line for about an hour, but I know the other one would've been much longer. The forums were cool, they're essentially just thousands of years of Roman rubble with a few things standing here and there. If you've seen pictures from Rome of some lone pillars, this is the spot. It was the main governmental area as well as the home of the emperors during the peak of the Roman Empire.

After a couple hours we went into the Colosseum, and I must say, it was pretty satisfying to walk past the hundreds (maybe even thousands, they say 13-16,000 people come in per day) of people still in line and walk straight in. We decided to do an audio guide, which was fun and helped us understand the Colosseum a lot more. It's actually a really gruesome place if you think about it, so it was sad but fascinating to learn about. After that, we walked to pick up our bags from our hotel, bought some yucky pizza for dinner, and went to the train station to head to Naples.

New Year's Eve 2014

I realize it's slightly beyond pathetic to post this entry almost a year after it happened...but I'm so close to having fully documented our adventures.  Yesterday, Spencer made a comment about me loving to start projects but being slow to finish them, I guess this is Exhibit A...or B...or C...  Anyway, here we go.

After leaving the monastery on Tuesday morning (New Year’s Eve), we headed to one last hilltop city called Orvieto. The GPS kept guiding us on all these windy scenic routes (to the point where I was getting car sick and Spencer was jokingly shouting "Hey Italians learn how to make a straight road!"). The majority of the time on these roads we could see the Motorway (freeway) nearby. But we kept following the GPS anyway; after all, she always got us where we needed to go. On our way to Rome, we figured out it was because the GPS was set on "avoid toll roads". We think this setting ultimately made for a lot of long-cuts in the middle of the countryside during our 4 days with the car, but after paying one €7.00 toll to get to Rome, I think we're glad.

 

So back to Orvieto, we got to the town and walked around and took pictures for a bit. The highlight of the town is their cathedral, but I think we are both cathedraled out so we weren't too excited about this. We did decide to get ourselves one last Tuscany meal for lunch. We walked around and found a place with a good TripAdvisor rating and decided to eat there. Spencer got a pasta with wild boar sauce, I had a pesto and tomato pasta, and we split a Truffle (mushroom) bruschetta, they all tasted delicious!! Hooray for at least ONE good pasta meal, 5th time's the charm.

This cathedral looked very similar to the cathedral in Siena

After Orvieto, we got on the Motorway and drove straight to Rome. I had booked our rental car to be dropped off in the heart of Rome at the train station, so poor Spencer had to navigate the absolutely insane Roman traffic. It took us a while to figure out where to drop the car off, but we figured it out eventually. After dropping the car off we went to our hotel, which was a breath of fresh air. It had a kitchen! And a comfy bed! Since we had a kitchen, we decided to go buy some groceries (we were pretty excited to have a nice bowl of cold cereal).

Around 10 we set out for the New Years Eve celebration in Rome. The main crowd of people was grouped near the Colosseum, so we could see the laser show countdown projected on the walls of the Colosseum and the fireworks shot above it. It was really fun counting down with everybody (in Italian of course) and watching the fireworks, mostly just because it's such a once in a lifetime opportunity. 

The less glamorous parts were the alcohol being spilled down my pants and shoes, the cigarette smokers in every direction, and the constant stream of guys trying to sell us flashing 2014 pins or bottles of alcohol. Once the clock struck midnight, everyone uncorked their alcohol to celebrate. The lady next to us offered us some, which we declined. I told Spencer it was probably just like Martinellis because they were giving it to their young kid, but we still said no. A minute later she insisted on giving me a cup. I tried to ask her if it was non-alcoholic, I think she was trying to tell me it was, but it was all lost in translation. I ended up slowly dumping it on the ground when they weren't looking.

There were a couple other people there with us.