intensely long blog. ready go.

As Cori and I might say, I Binged your mom last weekend. And we did.

Anyway, it was our Bing trip this past weekend---we went to Pompei, Amalfi Coast, and Naples, in that order pretty much. We were warned like crazy beforehand that we would be robbed, raped, and die in Naples if we didn’t stay alert, but we all came out of it alive for the most part. Probably because we stayed in Sorrento, a really nice resort town, and were only in Naples for like 3-4 hours.

FRIDAY

Woke up superearly to lug our stuff 30 mins to the train station- Cori is better than I and packed all her stuff in her backpack but I had my duffel bag. Train ride was 3.5 hours, mostly filled with eating snacks, talking with Nell and Val, and listening to my iPod, the best travel invention of all time. Arrived in Naples and got on our Pullman (aka large tour bus)—apparently all buses in Italy are called Pullmans, regardless of make. Anyway, the traffic in Naples was horrendous, so it took us like 20 mins to turn around and get on the freeway to Pompei, and people scrape each other’s cars all the time, its kind of like a bumper-cars-fend-for-yourself type of thing.


When we arrived in Pompei, we ate lunch, and I had the first bad gelato I’ve had here so far. Major disappointment, but it was soon remedied by seeing the ruins of Pompei. Very cool—we had an expert on Naples history (NOT a tour guide, she says) named Maria Laura, who was very small but very knowledgeable hahah. Anyway, we wandered around for like 2+ hours.. lots of wandering. We saw temples and homes and fast food counters where Brad claims they cooked Cori’s back in the day. There was this building with 2 dead people in it—we couldn’t really figure it out cause it was in Italian but we thought it was people who had been covered in hot ash, which then cooled into a sculpture-like thing. So creepy—some unnamed people in our group were taking pictures with the dead guys…ew. We also went to the forum and took a million pictures, and to a brothel. I was really struck by how well preserved most of it is—but mostly by how many stray dogs there were running around. Oh, and also how many freakin times the sorority girls asked me to take pictures of them.. at one point I def gave them some lip about it… oops. Oh wait I don’t care.


At night, we went out to dinner, I ate my weight in food and wine. Then a bunch of us sat outside by the pool drinking the cheapest spumante ever, and exchanging funny stories about people at Stanford. Aww. Cori and I thought we’d be sharing a bed, but lo and behold it was two beds pushed together with one comforter. Intense. Oh, our hotel was in Sorrento and was very nice on a sidenote.. and Cori was my roommate, obviously.

SATURDAY

We woke up, ate breakfast at the hotel and boarded the bus again to tour around the Amalfi coast. For a few hours we were driving on these roads that we had to share with other buses and cars on the edge of the world. Literally, just a small wall of cement separated us from the edge of Italy/our deaths. So scary! We got to Amalfi alive, thank god and went through the church—however, at this time we were so tired of churches and standing around listening to Maria Laura talk for ages. Afterwards, we all wandered around—people were suntanning at the end of October! It was beautiful and like 75 degrees…damn. Once more, many pictures were taken. That’s kind of our thing, being girls, apparently…who knew that I was one?

Next we drove on to Ravello, another small town on the coast. This one was less happening, and we had to go through another church, but we also toured this beautiful garden. Bussed back to the hotel in Sorrento on the scary roads. At one point we had to get in reverse and I swear the back of our bus was about a foot from the edge of the cliff.

A bunch of us (just girls this time) went out to dinner together. There was an attempt to unite the two groups in the program, but it failed rather miserably.. oh well. A few of us went up to Brad and Will’s room, where they were watching The Ring in German—we narrated with lots of German words that we knew (weinerschnitzel, gutentag, frau, Weitzel). We were pretty good at German… I didn’t understand the movie at all, actually. Instead of dwelling on it, however, a bunch of people went swimming, too cold for me and I had no bathing suit… stayed up for awhile talking and then went to sleep.

SUNDAY

Breakfast in hotel, checked out, bussed back to Naples to go to yet ANOTHER church.. ahhhhhh! Then we had the “Bing Lunch” with about 10 courses—fried dough and some ricotta thing, pasta carbonara, caprese salad, and then coffee. We were all waiting for the Neapolitan pizza, but none came. : ( We piled back onto the train and spent the 3.5 hours going crazy, as I did not bring any books and my iPod was dying slowly. Mostly talked to Carolyn and Val, and took ridiculous pics. We played Egyptian rat screw towards the end, which got heated real fast—reminded me of Trancos ski trip and my dear “cousin” Andrew.

Quite a solid weekend- don’t you love when rich families pay for you to go places?

Current tasks:
-preparing all the work I have to do for next week because Ashley comes this weekend!!
-Hostels for Rome and Venice
-History midterm, Italian midterm, and Art History take home midterm all due next week. GAH.

It’s looking like I’ll be changing my flight home from Dec 15 to Dec 20, so I can go to Spain for a few day with Christine, perhaps Cori, and see Kristen. Home just before Christmas yay!

p.s. i still feel large.