Leaving Salzburg for Prague today!
and for now... another post from almost a month ago!!!

JULY 31st

headed to Naples (Napoli) in the morning. Jee had been talking about Naples having one of the three most beautiful ports in the world and of course it is the birth place of pizza, so it was definitely on our itinerary.
i'd read in the LP that bag snatching and theft was pretty rife so i was prepared for clutching my bag close to me.

what i wasn't prepared for was how much a pock mark on the face of italy Naples would be! it was absolutely filthy. around the main station area almost felt like a third world country. of course there were the usual "non-italians" selling fake shite galore, but there were a couple of guys selling laptops and mobiles too.

can anyone say "stolen goods"?

as we were walking to the korean minbak, this one guy walks up to me and says:
"do you speak english?"
"yes"
"can you break a 100 note for something smaller?"
(of course i do mate. and while i reach to get my wallet, which bag do you wanna run off with? or do you just wanna grab my wallet which is chained to my bag?)
"no sorry"
and he walks off. guess we're obvious and easy targets cos we're carrying big backpacks and multiple other bags.

got to the minbak which was nice enough, but didn't have that personal feel like the Roman minbak.
dropped our bags off and left pretty soon. on the way out Jee had a quick conversation with a korean guy who is a tour guide. he mentioned how young koreans are getting quite rude and that they'll sometimes actually threaten him that they'll write bad comments about his tours on the internet. the net is definitely one of your closest allies when travelling and can easily sway your decision making by reading other people's experiences.

caught the train to Pompeii. ended up being the wrong train. sure it stops in Pompeii, but it stops at modern Pompeii station, not old (we got our asses whupped by a volcano) Pompeii.
there's a different company's train line that runs to old Pompeii, not the standard rail line.
so we walked for about 25 mins to the ruins and jumped inside.
it's another one of those "i'm looking at almost 2000 yr old crumbling buildings in the peak of summer" experiences again, but truly interesting too.
there are a fair amount of buildings that are intact (incl a brothel with ancient porn painted on the walls!) and it's interesting to get a feel for how things may have been back before Vesuvius went ape shit. some of the resident must've been really rolling in it judging by the size of their abodes. there was one house that had a mosaic on the floor with probably one of the original "beware of the dog" signs in history!

SIDENOTE: mosaics... bloody impressive when you think about them. lots of little tiles all put together to form patterns or pictures. guess they last longer than painting, but the time it would take to make them!! that was one thing i forgot to mention about the inside of the dome of St Peter's Basilica -- it's all decorated with mosaics made up of tiny tiles. and it's definitely not small!! to look up from below, you'd think it was just a painting, but get closer and you see it's all mosaics! very impressive!

spent a few hours checking out various parts of the ruins and then headed back to Naples.grabbed pizza from a LP recommended place called Trianon which was decent.