Part 2 of Marty’s travels in Sorrento, Italy, on Sep 23-27, 2009.
We decided after the second day that we wanted to change hotels to a more affordable one; Settimo Cielo had a breathtaking view, but it was setting us back 140 euros times 2 rooms per night. So we lugged our bags almost 2 miles to another hotel that was more on the discount side of things. This time all four of us were sharing a room. We asked for one with 4 beds and they said they had one. But they gave us one with four BUNK beds. That’s right. Take a look:
I don’t think bunk beds were designed to support a 6-foot, 160-lb body. I took the bottom bunk and Jessica the top. The thing was made of cheap plywood and thin metal braces and clamps that looked like something from Ikea. (Did you know a lot of Ikea’s stuff is made in Italy?) It kept creaking and acting as though it would give out at any moment, sending Jessica collapsing down onto me and crushing my skull. It was a little hard to sleep that night!
On the third day in Sorrento, after checking in to the exciting bunk bed hotel, we caught a train to visit Pompei, about half an hour away. I will admit that as a dumb American I had never even heard of Pompei before, but apparently it is very well known and people travel from all over the world just to see it. It’s the remains of an ancient Roman city that existed as far back as 6-700 B.C. In 79 B.C., there was a huge eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a large active volcano that sits just above Pompei. The lava and ash destroyed the entire town, and all the ash and dust covered everything and preserved it for thousands of years. Some archaeologists discovered it in the 17th century A.D., and they have been continuing to excavate it since. Apparently it’s considered an extremely dangerous volcano because it is still active eruptions, and roughly 3 million people still live on and around it, the largest population in range of a volcano in the world.
As I said, what makes it such an amazing find and attraction is how well preserved everything is. You can walk around the entire town. There are the remains of houses, public bath houses, religious buildings, kitchens, a water gathering room with a funneled open roof and a big pit in the floor to hold rain water, and even a coliseum where people watched gladiator battles. The houses still have remnants of frescos the people painted on them to decorate and to make their houses look bigger.
There are even entire human beings and dogs and other animals that were encased in volcanic ash and dust and were therefore perfectly preserved until now. You can see the plaster casts of the people, frozen in the positions they died. Imagine if you were scratching yourself or picking your nose or lord knows what else right when the lava hit. There would be tourists looking at you for thousands of years with a placard next to you saying, “We believe these are the remains of the town nose-picker.”
The town and remains just keep going on and on. There are groups being led around by tour guides speaking all kinds of different languages. I’m pretty sure I heard tours in English, Italian, French, German, and Japanese, plus one or two more I couldn’t place. The most popular area seemed to be the public bath house; there was a line to go in to view it. But the coliseum was cool, and seeing the human beings and dogs was cool. There was a building that the tour guide book said used to be a brothel. Do I want to know how they figured that out? There was also a 2000-year-old dog house, which I thought was the most adorable thing ever:
The best view was from the top of a small hill at the south end of the village. Here’s me on the hill with the city and volcano in the background:
We almost caught a taxi up Mount Vesuvius itself, to see the actual top of the volcano. But it was starting to get late, since we’d been walking for miles around Pompei itself seeing everything. We decided to skip it and get home, since the taxis and trains were about to stop running. We didn’t want to get stuck up there after dark. Instead we went back to Sorrento and caught a nice dinner.
The girls wanted dessert afterward, of course. Italy has lots of delicious sugary desserts. Besides the usual pastries, they have these Italian twinkies called canolli. Jess and Meg devoured several of those. They also have this soft fruity ice cream called gelato that is quite delicious. I can’t eat dairy products, but I usually steal one or two licks of their cones because it’s just so good. Many a choco nubbin was filled on this trip (inside joke).
On our fourth day in Sorrento we did something I had been bugging the others to do all along: rented scooters! For around 30-35 Euro, you can rent a 100-150 CC motor scooter for a day and drive it around wherever you want to go. This area is much more scooter-friendly than a lot of places in the States. The cars are generally much smaller, with no SUVs on the road, and there are lots of people on motorcycles, scooters, Smart cars, or other very small vehicles. I would be terrified to drive a motorcycle in the US, but this was just fine. Here was my “hog”:
We rented two scooters; each held two people. Toni and Meg shared one scooter, and I drove with Jess on the back of the other.
I had never driven a scooter or motorcycle or any similar vehicle before, and we had literally zero practice. We just had to push on the throttle and jump out into traffic. It was mildly terrifying. But I jumped out into the road, and with a little wobbling, I was on my way.
We set out for the village of Napolitano, around 25-30 km away from Sorrento. This area had a more accessible sandy public beach. Part of the appeal of going there was the drive. We got to take our scooters around these mountain cliffs, with perhaps the most breathtaking view I’ve ever seen. Just miles and miles of winding, curving, mountain roads on the scooter with vater and fresh air and sunshine all around you. It was spectacular.
We had lunch at a restaurant right on the beach. I got pizza, which is kind of stereotypical, but I have to say, actual Italian pizza tastes spectacular compared to USA chain pizza. I don’t know exactly what it is. It’s lighter, and the sauce is much better (tangier and thinner and less of it). They have interesting topics like tuna and olives and fresh artichokes and potatoes and salmon and really good sausage and ham, or basically whatever you can think of, they’ll put it on there for you. Tastes great.
After lunch we parted ways with Meg and Toni. They stayed to enjoy the beach longer and travel a bit more up and down the coastline. Jess and I had to head back to catch a train, since both she and I were flying home out of Rome early the next morning.
We stayed the final night at a pretty crappy “pension” hotel, which is basically a hostel room with a bathroom. If you haven’t stayed in a hostel, it’s like a cheap dirty hotel but with shared communal areas for bathroom and sink and kitchen and stuff like that. Hostels are pretty sketchy and minimal but they save money. We did this one just because we were only staying there one night and wanted to be right by the train station. Only one of the five light bulbs in the room wasn’t burnt out, and there were vaguely prostitutey women standing around right outside the hostel’s door. The hotel manager guy told us, if we left the room or went to sleep, for God’s sake lock the door. That’s comforting.
We had a nice final dinner together, followed by a final pistachio gelato cone for Jess. At the table next to us, there was a couple where the guy was trying to explain football to the girl in intricate detail. He was breaking apart breadsticks into a dozen small pieces and lining them up as though they were football players, and he was showing her a nickel formation and a blitz and all kinds of things. She seemed to be sucking down her wine and being patient with this. Jess and I chuckled at how lame they were; what a loser! We then proceeded to spend the dinner talking about software engineering and object oriented design principles.
In the morning Jess and I walked to Rome’s Termini train station and we sadly parted ways. I’m so lucky I had Jess as a travel companion on the trip. She made everything so much easier for me and so much more fun. The moment I left her I became scared I’d get on the wrong train or step on a flight to Germany or something. However, I’m writing this from my flight from Rome to New York City, which I seem to have successfully boarded, so it looks like everything is going to be okay.
My dad said he feels a great sense of relief once he’s sat down in his seat for the plane ride home from another country. If you get that far, it means that you have basically passed everything major that you could have screwed up. You’re going to get home. Everything is going to be okay. I have been away from Seattle since 9/11, so I have started to miss my old routine. Sleeping in my bed, eating my own food, seeing my friends, playing with my own gadgets and toys. I’m even kind of looking forward to getting back to work teaching this fall, which starts just three days from now on Wednesday 9/30.
That’s it for my blog about my travels to Europe! I had a great time, and I’m glad I did this while I still can. Now that I have turned 30, I am starting to think about the fact that I probably won’t have too many more summers off where I am completely free to do as I like: no job, no kids, no family to take care of, and enough disposable income to do something fun. Not many people are lucky enough to be in a situation where they can just pop off to another country for three weeks. That is a real blessing, and I wanted to take advantage of it.