Naples: Where the men all have overly-waxed eyebrows

On Monday, we took a high speed train from Rome to Naples.  Our train went this fast

which might mean something to those of you who are familiar with the metric system.  All it means to me is that we reached Naples in under 2 hours.  

Ah, Naples....  We arrived about an hour before we were supposed to meet up with our tour.  That hour before the tour, as well as the 1.5 hours we had to kill after the tour/before we caught our train back to Rome, allowed us to spend some quality time with the lovely citizens of Naples.

The Naples train station is currently undergoing renovation.  One gets the impression that said renovation has been happening for a long, long time and will continue for much, much longer.  I honestly got the impression that as soon as one job was completed, another work crew would come along and undo the job, so it would have to be done again.  This suspicion was reinforced by the signs everywhere in the train station proclaiming "This renovation is made possible by a grant from the European Union."  

After dodging unwelcome advances from men with waxed eyebrows and poor fashions sense, hoards of beggars, and just generally unappetizing people, we met up with our group in front of a hotel across the street from the train station.  

We loaded a bus headed to Pompeii.  Our fellow travellers included a family from South Africa who pretended they only spoke Afrikaans, although everyone knew they also spoke English.  A Scottish couple.  A couple from Austin who had spent the past year teaching in Kazakhstan.  And a couple from Iraq.  We like to play the 'if a disaster happened now and we were trapped with all these people, who would you want to team up with in order to increase your odds of survival."  I instantly decided that the Iraqi couple would be the way to go-- they've already survived a dictator, invasion, and insurgency.  The Americans living in Kazakhstan were a close second.  The South African dad looked like he'd be the first to kill someone in the group and eat them at the first sign of a shortage in food. 

The bus ride to Pompeii was filled with lovely scenery (once we got out of Naples)--lots of sea and mountain views.  We learned that before the eruption in 79 AD, Mt. Vesuvius was twice the height it is now.  After about 40 minutes, we arrived at Pompeii, only to be swarmed by hoards of pushy street vendors trying to sell us all sorts of useless stuff.

Our bus collective split into 2 groups: one that was just touring Pompeii (us) and the other that was doing Pompeii, Herculaneum, and hiking Mt. Vesuvius.  Unfortunately, this is when we lost our partners in survival, as both the Iraqis and the American-Khazaks were on the other tour.  But we still had the South Africans and the chain-smoking Scottish couple. 

Our guide, Susi, was very friendly and knowledgeable. She also had a bright pink and turquoise umbrella for us to follow.  Our tour was about a 3 hour tour of the ruins.  She said you need about 8 hours with a guide to see everything.  At its height, Pompeii had more than 20,000 people living in it, and a large transient, sailor population.  

The city is much larger than I realized and I was glad to have a guide, since there really aren't signs or marked tour paths inside the walls of the city.  The Victorians established a system of street naming and addresses, but it's in Latin and is in a code, so...

We all had headsets so we could listen to our guide without being right next to her.  Aidan said his headset also allowed him to communicate with Humphrey back in San Antonio.

Before the tour commenced, we spent some time by this wall,

then we headed into the large theater.  The wooden features on the theatre are reconstructions-- we learned that because Pompeii was covered in hot ash, all the wood was burned, but the ash allowed for other materials (like impressions made by bodies, bread, and tile work) to be preserved.  Herculaneum, however, was covered by mud, so wooden features remain.

We then visited the smaller amphitheatre, which is known for its acoustics. 

 Susi asked if anyone wanted to sing.  That is when this happened:

Here's how you'd cross the street in Pompeii to avoid stepping in sewage.  This steps also dictated the minimum height for chariots, since they'd need to clear them in order to drive on the road.

We saw bakeries and brothels, fountains, and forums, temples and terraces.  I could go on and on with the alliteration.  But here are some pics of various ruins:

We also learned that the Romans used lead in everything--pipes, painting, makeup, wine.  They used lead pipes to carry their water and terracotta pipes to carry away sewage.  That might explain Nero...

We also learned that they liked phallic imagery, both to encourage fertility and prosperity

and to point the way to the brothel

where sailors got to receive services on stone beds and ordered from a picture "menu" on the wall.  The guide instructed Aidan to count all the stone beds (thus, he'd not see the picture menu), and I tasked him with photographing them, so we don't have any menu shots, and he just thinks the building was a hotel.

The town was relatively uncrowded, and we definitely did not feel like sardines in a can, which is not the case at many of the places we've visited this trip.  We'd all love to go back, and do Herculaneum as well.