July 23rd, 1998

We got up at 5:30 so we could make it to the train station on time. Our train left at 7:00am. It was the Eurostar train, which is the good kind. I had to make sure and get my coffee, so I ordered a coffee at one of the stands at the train station. It came in a little tiny cup, about the size of a medicine cup. Like you would get from Nyquil. I thought, "Boy, I'm not going to get much caffeine from this." I was wrong. It was just a normal cup of coffee concentrated in that amount. It was super strong. It was pretty gross. I have had espressos before and this was a lot stronger than that. I might has well have just poured the coffee grains in my mouth. It did give me my fix for the day, though. Our train ride over to Pompeii was uneventful. It was about a 3-hour trip.

A quick snooze in Pompei

Ticket to Pompei

We got to the ruins in Pompeii at about 10:00.

The first thing we saw was a colosseum where they had all their major events. It was amazing how good of condition it was in after all those years.

Entering the Colosseum

Taking one last look

On to the next ruin

It was a pretty big town. You could see several areas where they had paintings on the wall that had been preserved by the Volcano. It was in such good condition for being more than 1900 years old. It was really a neat looking town.

Some of the artwork

A look at what made up their pillars

You could see the areas where they still hadn't excavated yet. These areas were about a 20-ft high wall of dirt. The amount of work that went into excavating this was definitely immense. There were a lot of different ruins of houses and shops, and various interesting looking walkways and streets. The streets were made of stone, but at certain points on the road there was a line of large stones going across the road with about 2 foot gap in-between them. The stones were about 2 feet wide and a foot long and stood about a foot above the road.

The story behind that is that these stones were used for pedestrians to cross the road. The reason they sat so far from the ground is because, horse manure would accumulate on the roads because of their mode of transportation. The gaps in the road between the stones were so the wagon wheels could pass between these stones alright. I thought that was really interesting.

Elsie crossing the street as they did it long ago

In the glass case contains what they looked like during death

They also had some rooms were they housed some interesting sights. When Mt Vesuvius erupted and buried the victims beneath, the ash and sediment eventually hardened over there bodies. Over time, their bodies decayed and withered away, but the ground kept it's shape. So during the excavation of these ruins they noticed cavities in this area beneath that looked like the mold of human bodies. They where able to cast molds from these cavities and create replicas of what they looked like at the moment of death. Quite an eerie sight to say the least.

It was a very hot day that day, and the sun seemed to reflect off all of the white stones that covered most of the area. It took us 5 hours to see what we saw, and we didn't even see half of it. We even had to hurry to get back to our train on time. Walking down the streets of Pompei On the way back we went to our reserved seats on the train and there were people sitting in them. For some reason, there wasn't any sign in this compartment that said that it was reserved. They were gracious enough though, to move to another compartment. It was a fairly cool compartment. By the time we got home, we were beat and thirsty. We took showers and rested a little bit. We then headed down to the colosseum before our 75 minute metro tickets ran out from the metro back from Pompei. We ate a place near the colloseum that was recommended by the guy at the hotel. Our waiter seemed a little strange. When he came over to our table, he went up to Jessica and said "Christina, we've been waiting for you!". We thought he was kind of loopy. He seemed to be very fluent in English, though. When Jenny was ordering, she ordered annn.. Ice Tea. She kind of ran the words together just a bit. Arnie kind of made fun and said oh you want a nice tea. This waiter understood the joke and said "Ok, I'll get you a nice Ice Tea." When Elsie ordered, she wanted chicken. But the only chicken available was a 3 course meal and the pasta course had only 2 choices. Neither of which she really wanted. So we Arnie did was order a separate pasta dish that Elsie wanted, because one of the Elsie's choices for pasta was what Arnie wanted. They would just switch when they brought it. Well, instead of bringing all of our pasta dishes at once. They only brought Elsie's. Since they were switching, Arnie just moved it to in front of him and started eating it. Next time the waiter happened by he noticed that Arnie was eating the dish that was brought for Elsie. He had a puzzled look on his face and said "Wait a minute, I thought she ordered that." So Arnie quickly put it back. "That's better", he said. As soon as the waiter left, Arnie put the plate back in front of him and started eating. As the waiter passed by a second time, Arnie put the plate back before the waiter could see what happened. He heard the plate hit the top of the table though. He did a double take. "Now madame", he said, "you have to eat your own food". Then he said. "No, that's alright." Then when Arnie's pasta came, a similar kind of game happened. The "Nice Ice Tea" After Jenny had consumed her ice tea. Jenny asked if she could have another. "One more nice ice tea coming up." When he brought it back, he brought it back in a tiny thin shot glass, and said "Here's your nice ice tea." We laughed. "You didn't say what size you wanted." At the end of Elsie's meal she was supposed to have a fruit plate for dessert. He told her "I'm sorry, but we are out of the fruit plate. You have a choice of watermelon, watermelon...., or watermelon. And we also have watermelon." Elsie said, "I think I'll have the watermelon." Not long afterward, the waiter came back to our table with a friend, who looked like he was consoling him. As he mock cried, "I'm terribly sorry but we don't have watermelon." Elsie shed a few tears as well. "But we have ice cream." "I'll take that!" she said with a smile. It was very fun. Usually, the language barrier didn't allow much humor that both sides could enjoy. But that was definitely not the case here. After, he gave us the bill, he gave Jessica a neat poster of Rome as a keepsake. It was a perfect ending to a great meal. Jessica's Rome Poster The Colosseum, lit up at night We then walked a couple of blocks to the colosseum. We couldn't go inside because it was too late. But we did walk around it and peek inside at different points. It looked really neat at night. We took a few pictures and then went back to our hotel. Arnie and Elsie came up to our room to play rook. Our room had a balcony to sit on. From this balcony you could see the Colosseum. So we played out there. It was a last night of rook together in Europe. I finally lost that night. I was devastated. So much for my undefeated streak in Europe. I probably shouldn't say streak and Europe in the same sentence. We then turned in for the night. You can just see the Colosseum from our hotel room.