Naples, Italy

its a piazza that loves me...thanks Italy!

May 8th
After spending more quality time with Athens International Airport (and yet another delayed flight...thank God we have no more connections booked for the remainder of our trip...!), we arrived in Naples, where we were greeted with another interesting bit of public transportation and shaky hostel directions. We made it...that's all that matters. Well, pizza also matters. That's why we visited Naples. So we ate some almost immediately:


Although it was different from the thick-crusted, buttery delights that I adore back home, the thin crust pizza of Naples, with a fork-and-knife requirement, was fabulous. Chewy, doughy, cheesy goodness.

one of the various alleys we wandered through. EVERYONE hangs their laundry outside. EVERYONE. its like the place is constantly waving flags, celebrating something...

May 9th
6:15am comes really early when you've been on vacation for 3 1/2 months. We needed to catch a 7:35am ferry to Capri (pronounced cap-ree, just so you know), so I groggily made my way out of bed.

Capri was beautiful...absolutely beautiful, even if it was overrun with tourists. After our hour-and-a-half ferry trip, we stuck to land for an hour before jumping on a smaller boat to tour the island.



Capri is home to the Blue Grotto and the Green Grotto, and the famous Faraglioni rock point, and a 14Euro boat ride was the best way to see it all. However, Rob and I chose to opt out of the 11Euro 'visit' to the Blue Grotto. That's right, they put you on a boat for 14Euro before gouging you once again by charging admission to a natural wonder. To get into the Blue Grotto, passengers needed to take a teeny tiny canoe (steered by a tip-grubbing skipper) into the cave. This meant that passengers needed to step off of our boat and into said canoe. Fortunately/Unfortunately, no one ended up in the drink. We did time the length of the visit for those who ponied up the dough, which clocked in at a whopping four minutes.

swarming like bees to honey

exchanging tips from previous customers, in front of current customers...classy.

the opening to the grotto is really tiny, and the skippers pull the boats through via a chain

After hanging around outside the Blue Grotto for about half an hour (long enough for the 6 canoes to shuttle in the folks on our boat), we continued on to the Green Grotto and the Faraglioni before heading back to the port a few hours later:

the water color here is totally legit...not PhotoShopped at all, I swear.

LOVED these jellies, but they didn't love having their pics taken, and were dodging me bigtime.

Back on land, we headed up to the center of Capri...which we mistakenly thought would be a 20 minute walk. Wrong. A walk doesn't cover it. A haul straight up a hill covers it. We were winded and melting by the time we reached the summit, which did boast an amazing view. Since we're smart travelers, we'd gone to the local market and picked up some pruscuitto, salami, cheese and bread and had a little picnic.



May 10th
Rob and I were dying to climb Mount Vesuvius and check out Pompeii, which ended up being one of the main reason for visiting Naples. Food was the other, naturally. We took a super-shaky old train out to Pompeii and hopped on a bus to take us part way up the volcano. We'd heard that the climb took about 30 minutes, but based on our previous experiences with climb times, we figured we'd be up there most of the damn day. The bus wound up the mountain, and we arrived at the 'entrance' to the path up the volcano. It was different than we'd expected, and packed with other people.

a lava floe from the most recent eruption in 1944

It was already pretty hot by the time we got up to the entrance, and there isn't exactly shade on a volcano, so we planned to hoof it quickly and get back down to enjoy some more pruscuitto in the shade. I clocked our time, and we were halfway back DOWN after 18 minutes. This was mainly due to the swarms of sun-loving bugs that came out whenever the sun emerged from behind a cloud. They didn't sting or bite, but they were super annoying...ick.

that's a big hole! (where's the liquid hot magma?!)

We bussed back down the mountain on our way to Pompei's ruins. Again, not much shade in a town that was decimated by a volcanic eruption. Entrance alone was 11Euro per person, and an audio guide would have cost 6Euro more. In order to get a map of the place, you had to rent the audio guide. One thing I'm getting tired of in Europe is being nickled and dimed for everything: toilets, bread, water, sitting 'fees' in restaurants. If the original amount you charge me is a bit higher, but includes everything, fine. Just don't continue charging 'little' bits at a time. Anywaaaaays....

our rendition of Pompeians (yeah, I'm going to hell.)

since we flat-out refused to rent an audio guide/map, we were a bit aimless...until Rob found this little beauty (in Italian, of course)

in the Pompei Colosseum

We thought that the ruins would showcase a bit more of a museum and we were really interested in seeing the (albeit morbid) last 'poses' of volcano victims. It turns out that there's not much museum after all (we weren't all that surprised), but we did find some of what we were looking for in the Garden of the Souls:

May 11th
Using our Eurail passes, we were bound for Rome by noon-thirty...

Overall opinion: Naples was pretty cool. It's got a bit of a bad rap as a bad city, with lots of pickpocketing and rascals, but we steered clear of these things. I grew tired of constantly dodging people, but loved the food and the weather. It was a great base for our day trips, and our hostel was pretty amazing. I'm not sure that Naples would be high on my list of places to visit again, but I think I'd go back someday...