Italy stop #2-3: Naples Pompeii

We arrived in Naples Monday night and overshot our trainstation so we had to get off 1 stop late. The place looked so sketchy, total ghetto style. every window in the station was broken, hte roof was full of holes (and leaking since it was raining). Was weird. The city was also just building a metro system so it had to use regional train as its transit system so it took forever to catch a train back.

We got up early Tuesday to go to Pompeii. Pompeii was an ancient city that was wiped out when Mt. Vesuvius errupted and covered the whole place in ash and stuff. The city is huge and is still under going excavations. There were a ton of building ruins, as well as artifacts. Almost all the wall frescos were taken out so they could be preserved so had to find a museum to see those. We walked around the whole area till it closed (4pm, not enough time to see it all).







When we got back to Naples we hunted down a resturant called "Da Michele" which they say has the best pizza in the world. They had 2 flavors, margareta and marinara. The were pretty big and fairly cheap (4.50). They were pretty good and vey Italian style but I think I'm too used to the meat lovers and stuff and none of them had any meat. Either way it was filling and good.



Back at the hostel we meet a man from Ireland so we talked to him for awhile (we're going there for St. Patricks day so went to get info). I learned so much about Guiness so I'm all set now. Apparently, the proper way to pour a guiness is to fill it about 85% full, wait 5 minutes and top it off with a lot of foam. If it's a good glass, the foam top will last the whole beer. Also, the foam is key in telling if the pub is a good or not. You look and see if all the glasses has a good foam cap or not. If they don't, then the glasses are dirty since any oil will kill the foam cap. It was pretty interesting and I'm totally looking forward to Ireland now.

On wednesday we went to the National Archaeological Museum to see the wall fresco and stuff from Pompeii. They were really nice and had a really neat style (mosaic).







Afterwards we Ate some Sfogliatelle (some pastry we were supposed to try since it was special to the area). It was some flaky pastry with Ricotta cheese inside. It was pretty good but expensive. Afterwards we went to 2 castles, Castle Dell Ova, and Castle Nuovo. Ova had a museum thing there with some neat stuff (the iron door that has a canonball from a ship back in the day) and Nuovo was big and could just wander around the whole place (free).





We decided to try to find a good pasta place for dinner and ended up at "Da Mimi" as it was recommended by the tourist info guy. It was really good but the portion was fairly small and it was pretty expensive (the dish was fair priced but so many hidden fees). We pretty much gave up on resturants after that since they were too expensive and we weren't getting much from them. I had Calamarata con vongole e calamari (calamarata pasta with clams and calamari). It was really good thought :)

That night we took the "Train from Hell" (or TFH as it will be refered to from here on). We had to take a nighttrain from Naples to Pisa but the ticket guy didn't reserve us seats, so we figured we'd be ok, boy were we wrong. The TFH was fully packed with no seats at all free. Dima and I went to the section that 2 cars join together to get some room but boy was that a mistake. Italian smoke like crazy and aways do it in the connection points so we had no air at all, we finally gave in and went to the corridor in hte train. Since there were compartments, but aisle was super small. We had to sit on the cold floor the whole night, which wouldn't be too bad, but every 2 minutes someone would walk by to go smoke so you had to stand up to let them pass. (damn Italians). So we stood all bunched together till about 5 am when we had to get off at Pisa. The trainstation at Pisa had absolutely no heat, so it was freezing and we had to wait till around 10 for the Tower of Pisa to open so we tried to get some sleep there, was not the best night of my life.