Pompeii

We decided to take a day away from Rome and journey down to Pompeii. We had originally planned to do a day trip from Naples, but when Naples got cut, we were determined to still fit in Pompeii. It wasn't too bad - 1 hour 10 minutes down to Naples on the bullet train and then 30 minutes on the Circumvesuviana commuter rail. Pretty easy to figure out. We get to the station in Rome and I go to buy tickets at the machine while Skip goes off to find breakfast. Within two seconds some creepy dude comes up trying to 'help' me decipher a machine that's already in English. I think he was a little taken aback when I told him in no uncertain terms to go away. I think tourists are usually more polite and skittish. Another minute, I've put my credit card into the machine and I'm just waiting for it to spit it back out with my ticket and another stupid woman comes up to me and tries to 'help' me. When I tell her I got it, she still asks for money on the way out. Seriously, does this work on people? Rome was the capital of beggars, no doubt about it.

Skip rejoins me and I yell at him to never leave me alone at a ticket machine again and we get on the train. It was a very easy trip to Pompeii - just follow all the other tourists. When we get there it's sprinkling again. Europe is constantly raining. The line for the tickets is a bit long, so we go over to the map window first. We want the map and the free guide that tells you what all the sites are about. She tells us we need to buy a ticket first. K. Stand in line, buy the ticket, want the book. She's out of English maps. It's just barely noon. Seriously? We get stuck with the stupid audio guide we have to pay for and then don't use much because nothing in Pompeii is labeled. You have to figure out what you're looking at from the map. That is in Italian.

We get food at the cafeteria there before walking around some. Pompeii is huge. Half of it hasn't even been dug up yet. We find all the major sites - house of the faun, tons of baths, temple of Jupiter, temple of Isis, the theater, the whorehouse, etc. In the supposed red light district we find a hundred people trying to file through the main whorehouse. I don't know why. Everything's pretty faded and it's barely bigger than a NY studio apartment. Ah well, we came, we saw. It was great, except most of the artwork and furniture that was recovered is now in the Naples National Archeological Museum. Next time we'll go to Herculaneum - supposedly better preserved and very little looting done. But I'm still glad we went to Pompeii - if you get far enough away from the entrance (where all the horrid tour groups gather) you can get down some streets with no one on them. It's pretty nifty walking through god-knows-how-old ruins all by yourself. We didn't get to the Colosseum, cause that was allll the way on the other side of town. Maybe next time. We caught a train back into town around 6. We were going to take the cheap regional rail back to Rome, but we timed it badly and we'd have to wait an hour for the first one to get here. Then it wouldn't even get us home till after 9. So we splurge and get the bullet train back, which gets us into Rome around 7. We can still wander around a bit and get dinner before the sun really sets (which is somewhere around 10 in Europe).