Jewbacca.com - Entry from Europe Journal - Summer 2003 in Naples, Italy

So here is my travel journal from my backpacking trip to Europe. It's more involved than my day log stuff that's already been up the site. There has been some complaining (you know who you are) that my daylog was rather boring and that it focused too much on the details of transportation. I can't promise that this is less boring, but's there's certainly a hell of lot more of it. Occasional parts of the journal have been omitted to protect the (not-so)innocent. These parts really weren't that common, but hey - use your imagination. Keep in mind that this is a journal and things like punctuation, sentence structure, paragraph breaks, grammar, and spelling may or may not been a part of the writing process. Not to mention my almost criminal use of parenthesis. Like my pictures, the writing is quite erratic as far as consistency of content. The journal style kind of mutates over the course of the trip. Read at your own risk.

5/20 - Naples, Italy

I'm sitting in Naples, waiting for my train to leave for Rome. There was another train leaving slightly earlier, but I wasn't quite sure where it left from. Apparently around here the Metro and the railroad are somewhat interchangeable, and I think this train left from the Metro station. I figured the slight delay would be worth the less crowded train. So I got into Naples yesterday decently rested, but feeling utterly nasty. The one thing I forgot to take into account when taking 2 night trains in a row is that you can't shower. I got a hostel recommendation from a Scottish girl I met in the train station (it was one I was going to call anyway from the book, but this cemented my decision). It was a nice little hostel, called Six Small Rooms. The rooms were very nice, big open ones with no bunkbeds. And they had 2 cats, which for me was a nice bonus. The bathrooms were pretty crappy though. The showers were either just a trickle, or had shower curtains so close in they stick to you. Still, when I got there I immediately took advantage of the facilities because I really, really needed a shower and shave. Somewhat cleaner, I went back to the train station and hopped on a train to Pompeii, my reason for coming to Naples. It took me forever to find the ruins from the train station, signs are conspicuously missing. Once I found the ruins and payed my €10, I went in and was amazed at the amount of ruins. It's a whole damn city's worth. The ruins get a bit repetitive after a while, but you really get a sense of people having lived there because so much of it is there, unlike some random ruin all by itself. Alleyways and marketplaces bear such a resemblance to their modern equivalent that it's creepy.

Something else that piqued my interest the remains of color on the walls. For some reason I always picture roman architecture as mostly white. One of the main reasons I went to Pompeii was that I've always been fascinated with the figures frozen in time (figuratively) by the lava.

I wish they'd had more of them, but the few they did have were kind of creepy. Some of them are detailed enough that you can see the shape of the clothes they were wearing.

I didn't see all of the ruins, I got bored after about 2/3 of it and went back. After getting back into Naples, I found some cheap internet access and spent an hour and a half looking up concert dates in europe, all the while cursing myself for having not done it earlier, because I've missed several opportunities already. Oh well, it looks like I may be able to still catch a few of them, and that gives me incentive to start cementing the rest of my trip. After that I grabbed a kebab, and went back to the Hostel. Hung out talking to people, it was very laid back. At midnight you have to go to bed or go outside to the plaza. A bunch of people went down, but I decided that for once sleep sounded better.

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