Day 3 Pompei June 26, 2011

Okay I have to admit; I was secretly supper excided about going to Pompei. I blame my nerdy obsession with Pompei on my high school Latin teacher Ms. Moshos. Whenever we had a substitute teacher in her class, which wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, we would watch videos on Pompei. Ms. Moshos showed some real gems. My favorite was the bootlegged recorded PBS-made-for-TV documentary on a VCR tape. You know the grainy 1980ish videos where the person in the front of the class was in charged of fast forwarding through all the commercials? By my second year in Latin I discovered if I ask Ms. Moshos any general question on Pompei, I could get her started on a tangent that would last the entire class thus delaying any quiz or test that was scheduled for the day. It was a tactic that served me well up until my last year in Latin and one that I proudly passed down to future Latin scholars. 

So after years of sitting through those movies I had to be somewhat excited to see the real thing. We took the ghetto subway to the Pompei runes sight and met our guide for a private tour. After over two hours of this tour I began to feel like this man would be total husband material for my former Latin teacher. He was really smart and knowledgeable about everything don’t get me wrong but boy did he talk a lot. I mean there are only some many ruins of accident houses a girl can take. He did take us to the “red light” district of Pompei that was pretty funny. We went into a house that had twenty different bedrooms and above each bedroom door there was a scene painted above that told the prospective customers what they would be umm for lack of better words, “getting”. The picture below shows a man dressed as a woman.

Is a caption even necessary?

View from the hotel

Hanging out in Pompei

 After a whole day of trekking around ruins we got back to the hotel and I had a sudden burst of energy. To my surprise our hotel had a “gym”, which is pretty rare in Italy. I say “gym” because it was a set of free weights with a treadmill in a room with a computer and a TV so nothing too fancy. I wish I had taken a picture of the room because it was so cool. It had marble floors with little intricate painted designs and glass walls so you could see the rock and the hillside the hotel was built in.

That night we went down into the town for dinner and my darling mother wanted to return a purse that she bought last year that broke. I don’t mean like return a purse to a department store; this was a little hole in the wall local shop. At night in Sorrento they close the main street off and people can just walk around like a giant town square. Continuing our post dinner gelato routine Mom and I found a little nook off the main drag to get our nightly fix. Coming out of the shop with Gelato in hand I started shouting “Mom, this is delici…” but the entire street was quiet. An old Italian lady gave me a nasty look as she was rubbing her crucifix between her thumb and index finger. In the street there were a two rows of nuns. They were covered in grey and singing (or was it chanting?) just walking down the street. People were lined up on the sidewalks as priests, monks, followed the nuns and finally a middle age man wearing a sash the colors of the Italian flag who I assumed was the mayor of Sorrento. The different groups of monks and nuns with their unique dress reminded me of the different branches of the military and how they two have their own distinguishing uniforms. The entire parade was a spectacle to say the least. As I was about to get my camera out the scary old Itlitan lady next to me started making murmuring sounds underneath her breath so I nixed that idea.