Monday, December 15

Monday was our day in Pompeii.

We met on the 6th floor of the hotel in the morning and got ready to head off to Pompeii. The ruins of Pompeii are near the city of Naples which is about 3 hours away so we rented a charter bus for the day and took that there.

The drive there was rather uneventful, I slept just about the entire way. I do remember at one of the stops, however, that Molly decided to hide in the overhead storage and jumped out and scared George when he was going around and counting everyone. Once we started moving again, I went back to sleep.

It seemed like it was going to be a miserable day in Pompeii: it had rained during the entire bus ride to Pompeii. But by some miracle, as soon as we got there it stopped raining. Most of the group ate lunch at this one place that the bus parked right next to, but me and several others wanted to eat for a little bit cheaper so we walked down the street and found a place that did cost a little less. The food there was okay, nothing to write home about.

But after lunch, we went into the ruins and met up with our tour guide. He was very, very informative. He really had a lot to say on just about everything we walked by, and there was definitely a lot to talk about.

I'd have to say that of all the sites we went to, Pompeii was my favorite. Because it was so well preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, you can truly get a sense of what life was like almost 2,000 years ago. All the buildings, the walls, the streets are in great shape and it's really a city out of the past. The only thing that's missing are the people. You can still see grooves in the streets from the chariots that used to drive down the road. They actually restored one of the houses in Pompeii to give visitors a feel of what it would have looked like and this was absolutely amazing. I don't actually know how much restoration was done, but I don't think there was too much. I think the tiled floors were original and the frescoes on the walls. I think most of the stuff that was redone was the roof and upper walls, and some of the doorways that were reinforced.

After our tour was done, we left Pompeii at around 4:30 or so and headed back to Rome. Like before, I slept just about the entire way back.

Even though I had gotten all that sleep on the bus ride, I was still very tired from all the travel and went to bed early that night.

Pictures:

From Rome '08