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Just got back yesterday from a glorious weekend outing to the “scavi” of Pompei and the bella citta of Napoli. I went with three friends of mine from AUR, and it was a blast! I woke up at 6 am on Friday to hurriedly pack, take a shower and dash out to get to Termini (Rome’s train station) by 7:30, grabbed a croissant and a cappuccino for breakfast and caught the train just in time. It was a pleasant train ride, though most of us were still pretty tired and slept through parts of it. From Napoli Centrale we took the Circumvesuvian to Pompei, and tried to figure out which mountain looking thing was the Vesuvius Volcano! There were so many, it was pretty hard to tell.

The excavations of Pompei were really cool and really interesting to see, but after a while they all started to blend together in a haze of rubble and ruins. It was pretty warm there, and there is very little shade, so we started to get hot. Having gone in February, it’s hard to imagine how sweltering it must be in the summer time. There was some really cool stuff, though, like beautiful paintings and statues preserved from before the volcano erupted in 79 AD! For more pictures, visit: http://umd.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2238899&l;=f0386&id;=5739844

We took the train to Napoli in the evening, shopped for a while, checked out our hostel, and had an AMAZING dinner at a restaurant called Brandi. The next day we got up early, had breakfast, and checked out the millions of churches around Naples. For lunch, of course, we had the famous Neapolitan pizza, commonly said to be the best in the entire world, from one of the first pizza places in the world. We also sampled the famous Baba, pictured below, which was buonissimo! It’s essentially a rich, spongy pastry soaked in rum. All in all, it was a great weekend!