Pompeii and Sorrento

I got on the trip!!! YAY! Im so glad because this was by far the best trip so far and probably my favorite thing in Italy!
We started our day by going to Pompeii. I believe that I mentioned that yesterday that Pompeii is the city that got buried by an explosion of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. In 1748 someone came across part of the city while digging I believe to cultivate the area.. well every since then archeologists have been working to unbury the city, to this day there is still 1/3 of the city to be unburied.  The city was/is covered in about 20-25 feet of ash.  I had no idea what to really expect of Pompeii but whatever I had imagined it to be it was much much much more! It was huge! I mean a true city!

Where we entered the city there was a theater with benches and a huge open area for conversing before and after and during intermission of shows. Then we started walking through a road. On the road there are big stones so that only roman carts could pass through the streets and so that women could hop across them when it rained from side walk to side walk. I can explain this all better in person this is just to really help me remember.  In the streets on the stone roads are ruts from all the c arts passing through and wearing on it.

Then lining the street were all sorts of stores, even fast food type of places!  They can tell this by the open door ways and the counters that are still there and other artifacts found.  Also on the road up on the sidewalks (that were raised about a foot up from the street) are holes in the side of the sidewalk that acted as parking spots for the carriages/carts.  Many of the walls you can still see the old paintings and colors on them which is so crazy since this town is over 2000 years old! There was even graffiti! How insane! One that our really awesome tour guide showed us was something that basically was an election thing like a vote for me which are seen in many ways throughout the town.

Next our tour guide took us through a very big rich persons house and it was crazy! Through the front door it opens up to a huge foyer that has a sun roof to let in light and it is open so that it rains into the inside and lands in a basin that they use to collect water and use a well to get to it later to use for daily purposes.  The foyer leads through the whole house essentially they wanted a visitor to walk in and be able to see all the way through to the other end of the house to see how big it was to show how much money the owner had.  The house had bedrooms 2 dining rooms, a library, a spa and a lot of other rooms she didn’t identify.  What is really cool though is in the middle is a big garden and that’s what lights up the house during the day and the house just surrounds it. Also they used white marble a lot of the time in their floor mosaics (which we were able to see) because at night when there was no more sunlight they would use a lantern or light of some sort and the light would be reflected off the marble to brighten up the rooms.  Pretty neat. All the walls were painted like I mentioned before one had pictures of the Trojan horse story others were of columns or windows or a man sitting in an nice chair reading a book, many were 3 dimensional which all of this just shows how smart this people were too. 

We next walked through more of the town and took a very interesting stop.. it was a brothel. There were detailed pictures on the walls so that the men could point to what they wanted so that any language barrier between the man and the woman he picked was not an issue and he was still satisfied.. it was really weird.. there were 5 rooms on the bottom floor and 5 more on the top floor that we couldn’t see.. but the we could see the ones on the bottom floor and there were cement beds in each. the tour guide said that was to make sure things went quickly.. it was just a bizarre thing to see and think that they had so planned out..  next we continued on through the town and she stopped us at a street corner to show us something that was cemented into the wall.. it was a penis because apparently to them it was a symbol of fertility and safety so they were on every major street corner to provide safety to the towns people.. then we continue on and she shows us yet another one but this time it is on a stone in the road and it is supposed to be an arrow so that visitors to the city would know where the brothels were without having to ask and be embarrassed.. 

Along the walk we also saw one of the pipes that was part of the aqueduct that carried water throughout the city.. it was made of lead because they didn’t know that was bad. They only knew it was a cheap pliable material that worked well as pipes for them.   Also we saw in a road that there were little pieces of marble between the larger stones these acted as reflectors in the moonlight just like the floors in the house.. I mean really these romans were quite the thinkers..  we took a little break in the large town square for some pictures and exploring before we wrapped up the tour.  When excavating the city they found many skeletons of all the people that died.. they did not die from the heat or all the ash however, they died from a cloud of poisonous gas that was released from mt. Vesuvius.  So they all died instantly. Romans did not believe in burying bodies but cremating them so no one can study the bodies and bones to learn more about them. These fossils however are the only roman ones around because they all died at once from breathing in the gas. Then the town was buried in  ash so were the bodies but over time the body would decompose leaving jus the skeleton and an empty cavity in the hardened ash where the body originally was.  So what happened was when the archeologists excavated the city and could tell that they were coming close to an empty cavity they would just poke a small hole into it and pour in this liquid plaster then let it sit for a few days to harden then they could clear the ash off and have the left over mold of where the body was and be able to see what the body was like and how the people were positioned when they died.. we got to see a couple of these bodies and it was just really eerie but fascinating at the same time. Most of the bodies they said were in positions that were covering their mouths which help show that they couldn’t breathe.  There were a total of 5 of these molds that we saw two were of people laying down and reaching out, one was of a pregnant woman, one of a 15 year old boy that was sitting in a ball and the saddest of all was one of a dog that was truly in pain and it was just really really sad.. 

All of Pompeii though was really interesting and hearing all the hidden meanings of everything was really neat I really really enjoyed this trip and I was soo glad I got on it because it was definitely worth it! This was I think my favorite part of Italy with cinque terre in second only the insane hiking isn’t that far in the past for me to look back and say oh that was alright because im still kinda hurting =)

After Pompeii we next visited Sorrento which I don’t really know its significance or if it even has any but it was beautiful! It was just a quaint beautiful city.   We had an option to use free time for shopping or continue on with our guide and she would show us around a little more (Sorrento is her home town) so most of us followed along with her because she was just this amazing!  She took us around and we saw a Scottish wedding going on which was fun and we also stopped in this shop and test tasted Lemoncillo!!! Which is a special drink of Italy that is a lemon liquor. The main one was really really strong and you could feel it going down and we had the smallest little sample of it the second when we had was a cream of it which was much better in my opinion.  I really wish I could’ve bought some and brought it home but they have these insane alcohol bans on the ship, for good reason but still stinks for bringing stuff home.. im hoping they sell it somewhere back home because I would buy a bottle!

After this we had lunch at a restaurant which was much better than the SAS lunch in Rome we had spaghetti, pork, potatoes and cake not too bad.. a couple of us quickly went and got some gelato to finish of the day and then it was back to the ship. 
As a fourth of july celebration and an incentive to be back on the ship on time tonight we had a barbeque! Man was it good! We had hamburgers and corn on the cob!!! Soooo exciting! Not as good as home but we gotta take what we can get here.. it was really nice though! Then we also took our voyage picture on the aft of the ship before sailing out which was cool.. don’t know if ill actually be seen though..

Now once again we have just left port and its ciao to itlay! Two days at sea coming up next.. can you believe it we actually have  classes again tomorrow! Its been over a week and a half since we last had them!!  And we have an exam tomorrow that I should really start studying for.. yikes…