Today was insane. It
was probably about 100 degree outside and we decided to go to Pompeii to see
the ruins and then go back to Napoli to get the best pizza in the world. We took a bus to Sorrento and then took a train out to Pompeii. It took almost two hours to get there, which we didn't expect, plus a long wait in line to get in to the site. When we finally got in, we were surprised to see how giant Pompeii is. It's really a decent sized city with thousands of residences, stores, and other things a city has like piazzas, government and religious buildings as well as two giant amphitheaters. About 2/5 of the city isn't even excavated yet and we didn't even get to see 1/10 of the place, especially trying to navigate it with kids. It was so interesting that it was so open to the public. Any art left over is pretty well preserved, but you're allowed to go inside almost all of the ruins and climb over and step on stuff...well at least Henry did. There were no signs saying "no touching" so I hope it was ok. There were even some new convenience stores they put in the middle of the town for people to get food and drink, plus some of the ruins were also converted into offices for the archaeologists working there. We heard the government is worried that Vesuvius was ripe for another eruption again and are paying any residents 30,000 Euro to move, which doesn't seem to be tempting anyone. You can't buy anything with that if you don't get money from selling your house.
We saw the remnants of a few dead people, but didn't get to see the room with 13 people along with a child since it was under construction:( We spent some time in the smaller amphitheater and Henry even performed Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious with the stick and dance for everyone sitting up in the rafters. If I ran that place, I would schedule performances and fun reenactments for the people coming to visit.
After we left, we took the train back to Napoli(Naples) to get the best and cheapest pizza on planet earth. Napoli is no place for blonde kids because
there is a pretty large mafia presence there and if the kids get snatched they
could never be seen again…but we were willing to risk the lives of our children
for pizza. Since it was most people's yearly vacation, most of the delicious pizzarias were not open but we found one that was open, but didn't even open until 7pm! For those of you who don't know, Italians usually eat dinner around 9pm. Eating at 10 to 11pm isn't even unheard of. Since we had starved the kids to be hungry for pizza, they were getting really cranky. So, we decided to find some traditional pastries from the street. As we walked down one of the main street, our eyes were turned to the many bullet holes in every single glass window we passed. I wish I had taken a photo of the baby store with bullet holes in all the windows. haha. My favorite pastry in Italy is the sfogliatelli, which was fresh and hot at a little bakery we found. The kids ate it and also got some delicious gelato. We spent the next hour or so on Spacanapoli street where people were selling all sorts of strange things. This street seriously looked like Halloween, or more even like something out of Harry Potter. It seems like the local craft in Napoli is tiny dioramas with scary moss, freaky waterfalls and dead trees. You can buy a scene and then fill it with all sorts of moving people parts that are doing various things. You can also get tiny food, tiny furniture, and basically anything tiny you can think of. I found a tiny wooden tea set for Bea's Birthday with some tiny spoons. Lucy got her some tiny little pots to cook with. I wish instead of a freaky Halloween scene, they had cute little dollhouses or something. We bought a few things and then it was time for pizza. Unfortunately I think the kids weren't all that hungry, but we went and ordered like 8 pizzas anyway. The buffalo mozzarella pizza margherita cost only 4 Euro, which is insane because most pizza costs at least 10 Euro anywhere else around the country and buffalo mozzarella usually tacks on another couple Euro. Since it was so cheap, we ordered one for every child. The servers were like, "um, that's a lot of pizza. Are you sure you want that much?" Yes!! We ate ourselves to oblivion with the most delicious pizza with the softest crust. We had three left over to bring home. Yum. The server had our exact same family with four kids just about the same age. I don't know how he feeds them all with a job like that.
Thankfully we got a cab back to the train station and barely made it back to Sorrento in time to catch the last bus. We were so tired and hot from that long day and when we were riding in the bus back to our place, we noticed that all the lights were out in our town, which meant no air conditioning at our place. Nooooo! We got to the bottom of the huge hill and had no other choice than to walk with the kids up three long switchbacks up the hill. It was 11:30pm and all the kids were asleep. We had to wake them all up and carried them all up the hill. Henry had to walk and by the time we got up to the top, they were all wide awake at midnight. We had a rough time getting them back to sleep. Since we had no air conditioning, we had to keep the windows open and many mosquitoes came in to our apartment. Justin had 20 bites on each ankle. I was constantly covering myself with the sheet until I got to hot and then uncovered myself until I felt the mosquitoes biting me and back and forth all night long. That was a rough night! The babies' rooms didn't have air conditioning so their rooms were like stinky saunas. Poor little things couldn't even sleep. Next day, back to the beach!
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