Around The World!

We got to sleep in today and take our time leaving the hotel room. We decided to go to the train station to catch the only free train to Naples at 11:30. (On some high speed trains, we have to pay supplements. It has yet to be over 15 euro.) When we arrived, of course there was an earlier free train that wasn't listed in the book. We got on it, and arrive in Naples about 2.5 hours later. From there, we figured out to take another Eurail train one stop to Econala (or something like that). We couldn't figure out which way to walk out of the train station, and I stopped a guy on the street to ask directions by pointing to the name of the street, and he indicated he couldn't read. So I tried to pronounce this long street name with the best Italian accent I could...and he pointed up to the right and said something (which turned out to be WRONG). We were wondering why we came to Naples because it really was as trashy (literally) as other travellers had said. But we got to the hostel, got up to the room, and were impressed. There's even AC in the room. We wandered around town for a little while, but couldn't find anything that was open...it was the strangest thing. Then around 4:30, all the storefronts slowly started coming alive. I guess they have a little siesta here in southern Italy. We came back to the hostel and had a beer at the bar (there's a club in the hostel ! ) and then turned in.

We are in Naples, Italy for until the day after tomorrow, and there's graffiti everywhere, trash all over the streets, and David stepped in dog doo doo this morning on our way to the train station when we were going to Pompei! But the funny thing is that if you walk in one of the stores or coffee shops, it's really nice and clean. I don't get it! Even this hostel (called Fabric) is really nice and clean. It used to be a bottling plant. There was a dog barking outside of the window last night and David dared me to yell out the window "SHUT UP". So I opened the window, and right away, someone else goes "SHUUUUUT UUUP" in English and the dog actually shut up! Pompei was really awesome. The ashes from Mt. Vesuvius really preserved things well. Everything was painted yellow and red back then, and they still had graffitti on the walls from back then. I guess they passed on the graffitti through the generations too. After Pompei, we took a bus close to the top of Mt. Vesuvius, then hiked 30 minutes to get to the crater. It was smoking in places and you could hear it hissing and cracking every once in a while. You could barely pick out Pompei in the distance from the top. Overall, a very fun day! We are going to take a bus trip along the Amalfi Coast tomorrow, and probably spend some time on the beach in Sorrento.