From the Ghetto to the Slums

Last you read, we were sulking out of the Roma ghetto. In retrospect, Roma was a little piece of heaven compared to our next destination: Naples. My favorite part of Naples you ask? It's a 3-way tie between the trash covering ever part of every street, the parakeet calls from homeless men, and it's where I caught my annual horrendous cough (which I STILL have). I actually can't be too brutal about Naples because we didn't actually see any of it. As soon as we arrived at our hostel, we locked our backpacks up with more security features than the White House, loaded our guns, and headed outside into what I can only describe as a market filled with ex-convicts staring at two pieces of fresh meat. We got on a train to Pompeii because the idea of standing on a volcano that could erupt at any moment seemed safer than staying in our hostel (to the mothers reading this, we actually stayed in a castle and sat in a hot tub while servants brought us ice cream sundays and had a big guard standing at our door watching over us). Seeing the old village of Pompeii was actually pretty amazing. Kimmy and I have wasted our money in the past paying for the guided audio tours, so we decided to skip it and just walk around on our own. Of COURSE that was the one time that we actually needed them. Since there were no signs on the inside telling you what each room was, we decided to play a game and make up what we thought the purpose of room was (for example, one room was where they kept sheep, and another was where they sacrificed virgins). In the middle of our extremely educational experience, a man came up to us and asked us if we knew where we were. I replied "aren't we in Spain?" He gave us a nervous laugh, and then introduced himself as a tour guide and said that we should stick by him for the rest of the afternoon because our game was starting to give him chest pains. We had no objections.

This is where our trip gets interesting. We decided to run as fast as we could out of the Napoli slums, down to the Amalfi Coast. I should first mention that this would be our second time going there, as we got on the wrong train leaving Pompeii and ended up at the very bottom tip of Italy before either of us woke up to realize we had been going in the complete opposite direction for 2 hours. Yay! We got on the train and decided that since we had already been to the Amalfi train stop the night before, we would know when to get off again. However, this is Kimmy and Joanna you are dealing with, so of course we didn't end up in Amalfi. We got off at a random train stop with our backpacks, looked around at the empty world around us, and started laughing hysterically because we suddenly realized we had no plan for what to do next. We weren't even sure if we were in Amalfi. We just started walking. And walking. And walking.... And walking. Back spasms and empty stomachs combined with a cold and a cough made the two of us very pleasant people. We stumbled into a restaurant to get something to eat and basically collapsed at a table about 3 hours after we got off the train. There were no hostels in sight, and the one hotel we went into cost 100 euro a night (NOT HAPPENING!!). Over lunch we decided that seeing the coast was fun, and beautiful, but the severe lack of civilization and cheap beds was about to force us out of the south of Italy and into florence a day early. Just as we were bundling up to leave lunch, our waiter asked us if we had a place to say. When we looked up at him with our sad pathetic faces, I can swear that I saw a halo appear above his head as he handed us the address of a hostel for 10 euro a night. When we got to our room (which we realized was in Salerno, not Amalfi.. that's right, we WALKED from Amalfi to Salerno with our backpacks because that's obviously what the cool kids are doing these days) we were greeted by our roommate we was walking around completely naked and then decided to do crunches on the ground... completely naked. I chalked the situation up to culture shock, but when I was forced to step around her while trying to leave the room, that just crossed the line. Since I have preached the amazing benefits from wandering and getting lost, something good had to happen from accidently ending up in this town called Salerno; it did. We went for a long walk (as if we didn't walk enough that day) down to the coast and sat by the water for a long time watching some of the most spectacular waves I have ever seen, had the best gnocchi ever made, and found this amazing street filled with cute shops lit by only Christmas lights. Something is to be said about my getting lost philosophy because each time I do, I find something I would have never picked out on a map.

After the Roma ghetto, the Napoli slums and the naked girl hostel, we arrived in paradise; Firenze. I'm going to wait until my mother can catch her breath before I blog about Florence, but I can assure you, it has been nothing but a Utopia (which should make my next blog post very boring).