Pompeii and Mt.Vesuvius!

Today I climbed up Mt. Vesuvius!

It was a last minute change to the itinerary, and soo worth it! Again, I was traveling with Brandi, and we were going to head down to Pompeii and then visit Napoli (Naples) and then come back to Roma. We were reading the guidebooks we had and there was a comment about visiting Mt.Vesuvius, so we decided it had to be done! And wow, we took the train to Napoli, then the Circumvesuviana train over to this other town, then caught this minibus guided tour over to the volcano! The mere ride up the mountainside was worth the extra 5euros! We were jammed packed in the minibus, the road was skinny and windy and the driver honked before every corner and we were listening to the beatles... there was then a 20 minute hike to the top and then we looked down inside the crater of this active volcano - one that has brought so much destruction to the area around it for centuries!! And it is way overdue for itàs next erruption! then I realized, this is the third volcano I have looked down into - Mt.Bromo in Java, indonesia, then the Paos volcano in Costa Rica and now I can say I looked down into Mt. Vesuvius!! And the sun was shining and it was amazing!

The ride down was just as much fun, by this point we had picked up two Canadian boys to travel with us. We took the train over to Pompeii and got the audioguide. This is the town that was destroyed, covered in ash by an erruption of mt.vesuvius in about 79A.D. (or was it 49AD?) It is so well preserved, that when they excavated, they can still see the frescoes on the walls, and make out some mosaics and the marble columns, and the city layout. You get a real feel for how they lived in 79AD - almost 2000 years ago basically! They even have casts of the bodies that were preserved in the ash - you can see their facial expressions as they were caught in the terrible fate of being buried alive in the ash. There was this one man, you could see how he was laying on his back, with his hands above his head, clutching onto something, like a rope, and his legs outstreched, and his face contorted... It should have been gruesome to see, but I found it amazing and just stared at him for a while. Sad, of course, but the science behind being able to capture this image now - incredible! (ok, so that's the scientist in me...)

We even managed to, once again, catch the sunset over the ocean with the Isle of Capris in the background, and Mt.Vesuvius on the other side...

We headed back to Napoli to catch the train to Roma, however the free one wasnàt for a couple hours so we wandered around and decided we just had to have pizza from the town where it was invented!! This city - Naples - was incredibly dirty. It was gross, actually. I am talking about piles of garbage on the street, huge piles of cardboard boxes, litter everywhere, smells like pee, and people everywhere. Maybe it was just the neighbourhood where we were, by the train station, but it was quite bad. I had been warned though. And we did manage to find this traditional pizza place, eventually, where we had great pizza and a beer, and got to listen to big italian men yell and talk and yell at each other... it was fun. At one point I had to be the translater, apparantly I speak big italian men the best...

The train ride we got, the free one, we realized why it was free - it stopped at every town, and we didnàt get back until after midnight I think... but it was an incredible day!!

The next day in Rome we finally made it to the Vatican City - and before everything closed, which is at 12:20pm. (yes, that is the correct time). We visited the Vatican Museums - and i have to admit