Journey to Europe: Day Five Pompeii

Itinerary

• 7:40 – Tour Bus to Pompeii
• 10:45 – Pompeii Walking Tour
• 1:00 – Lunch
• 3:15 – Leave Pompeii
• 8:00 – Dinner

Mt. Vesuvius

Early morning start with taking the metro to where we needed to meet up for our tour. Sadly, we were unable to have the complimentary breakfast that our hotel provided, on a Saturday breakfast started at seven. So with empty tummies we went to the meeting point for our tour, which wasn’t really a tour, but a bus that would transport us to and from Rome and Pompeii.

The trip to Pompeii was a little over three hours with a stop midway to use the restroom, stretch, or get a little snack to eat; so we didn’t go hungry for too long. Riding to Pompeii we got to see the Italian countryside, making it all the while. Beautiful rolling mountains with cute little Italian villages perched on them and farms and vineyards. What was also interesting to see a long the highway was a few fields covered in solar paneling, sort of like the wind turbine fields we have in the mid-west.

Tessera Mosaic Floor Design- reads "Beware of the Dog"

Mt. Vesuvius actually looked like a normal mountain other than it had some kind of white smoke around the top of it. It was pretty large over looking the city of Pompeii and Héculean. I don’t quite understand why anyone would want to live in a city at the base of a famous volcano, even if it was inactive.

Tessera Mosaic Floor Design 

At the ruins my family decided we would not go on a guided tour, but get two audio tours that were like a radio that you typed in the number of the site or building you were at in the ruins and hold the radio up to your ear and listen. It was an okay tour, but we didn’t know what to go see or where anything was. There was a map, but it only had names of places and their number. Another thing about the audio tour was that the audio guide dragged on and on about the stories and buildings a little too much. Pompeii is defiantly a place of ruins, it is cool to an extent, but after awhile everything looks the same.

A Fresco in the Villa of the Mysteries

The Most disappoint thing about the Ruins that I heard so much about was the things archeologist found buried beneath the layers of ask from the volcano that had been preserved. Also the process the archeologist did by using the ash that had harden, creating a mold around actual people who had been caught in the ash and had died of suffocation. They poured plaster into the ash molds to unveil what people looked like, what they wore, the tools they used, what their culture was like, and what they worshiped. But all of the findings were not there, there was only a few things locked up in a room that you could peer through, most of it is in Naples, Italy at the Archeological Museum. I found this to be very disappointed after learning about how cool the findings were in Art History and other history classes I had taken in the past.

We had lunch inside of Pompeii at the cafeteria they had there, which was packed with people and overly priced food. Once you leave the ruins you cannot enter back in without having to pay again. So we watched for tables that were leaving like vultures, because by that time our feet ached and we were all sweaty from the hot Italian sun. When we finally got a table, the people left a mess and we had to clean it off. While cleaning off the table mom accidently bumps and empty glass beer bottle someone left and it shatters all over the floor of the cafeteria and over a dozen eyes turn to stare at us while we try to sweep the glass shards into a pile with our feet until a employee finally comes over to clean it up.

Vases and man laying down found buried beneath ash

a person found crouched, maybe praying.

In the end Pompeii was okay, but I rather have gone to the Archeological Museum in Naples. My favorite part of Pompeii trip was the ride to and from on the bus, watching the country side of Italy than the hustle and bustle of Rome.

Dinner we ate on top of a hotel terrace, where I had pasta with prawns which was very yummy. 

Hot Doggy