Don't Want to Land in...

It’s funny, but even when I think I’m so acclimated to a culture – not part of it, mind you, just USED to it a little – I observe something that shocks me back into remembering that I am not home. Tonight MR and I were dragging ourselves and our belongings through the front door of the Marriott Courtyard at Fiumicino, the Rome airport, and I swear I could have been anywhere from mid-Florida to upstate New York to Salt Lake City – that’s how used to the Marriott I am – but suddenly I found a sign that I was not back in the Great United States yet*. Outside of the big front door sat two flight attendants having an in-depth discussion that almost certainly covered the philosophy of gossip; none of this is shocking, I know, but here comes my reminder: they were drinking beers.

I have never seen a flight attendant in the US sit outside of a Marriott by a main road and drink beer. I’ve actually never seen a flight attendant in the US drink beer, but I assume they at least have the capacity to do so, and the point here is not the beer so much as the alcoholic content of the beer – I think you begin to understand why I did a bit of a double-take.

Anyway, on to more solid and historic (if not more exciting) ramblings: today was the day of the long-awaited Pompeii/Herculaneum trip. MR and I started the day off right by sleeping in for half an hour, and then managed to take about four hours to drop our bags off at the train station in Naples and then get back to Pompeii. To be fair, the Circumvesuviana is really rather slow, and despite leaving the Hotel del Corso in Sorrento a little after 9am we did not even arrive at the train station in Napoli until 11:15. Then we went through finding the baggage check, checking the baggage, trying to check MR in for her flight tomorrow, giving up on that, getting back to the Circumvesuviana, having to wait for the 12:11 train, and then riding that train for about 40 minutes before arriving in Pompeii. Really, they should make the Circumvesuviana go just a teensy bit faster. In a direct contrast to MR and me, it’s rather slow.

Pompeii was dry, dusty, sunny, and hot. After having finished my novel and read about half of a historical treatise on the city in the space of about 30 hours, I found myself looking around a bit warily for signs (earth rumblings, steam coming up for the ground, gods or giants cursing us mortals for always having to take our birth control when we’re hanging out in their most celebrated places, etc) that Mount Vesuvius was about to throw up on us just like it did back in 79 A.D.** I kept chanting, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know where I’m a-gonna go when the volcano blow”.

Jimmy Buffett is probably some sort of prophet. He sings about being born 200 years too late to be a pirate, but his lyrics to “Volcano” really might have been useful to the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum about 1900 years before he wrote them. Elton John knows that “If someone else is suffering enough to write it down / And every single word makes sense / Then it’s easier to have those songs around”; I think the mummified ancient Italians MR and I saw today would have agreed with EJ and would have known, “when all hope [was] gone”, to “tune in and turn [Volcano] on”***.

Pompeii itself is actually rather confusing; there are few signs around to indicate what exactly one might be looking at, which I suppose encourages visitors to splurge on tour guides, but MR and I got an inexpensive guidebook and wandered around through the dust (I pretended it was ash, and that the granite was pumice, and that, when I tripped, it was because of small earthquakes and not because I was wearing flip-flops with no tread). We spent about two and a half hours around Pompeii and left exhausted and covered in dirt (volcanic ash), and greeted the Circumvesuviana with less than excitement. The ride to Herculaneum was not long, but the walk to the site – from the train station in Ercolano to the Scavia, or excavation – took us about 20 minutes****. We thought we were helplessly lost and found that the people of Ercolano are rather unfriendly, but eventually we stumbled upon the Scavia and were let in by a bored-looking guard who barely even glanced at our tickets. I found myself wishing we had not paid.

At first, Herculaneum seemed much less exciting than Pompeii, which surprised me since everyone had told me it was the better of the two sites. Herculaneum is significantly smaller to begin with, and only a small portion of the ancient ruins have actually been excavated, so in contrast to Pompeii’s sprawl we could see all of Herculaneum when we entered and looked down. The exciting thing about Herculaneum, though, is actually that rich people lived there. Whereas all the houses in Pompeii look like they’re built for people smaller than me, the ones in Herculaneum actually seem livable. As I said to MR, it was easier to relate to Herculaneum; though Pompeii was obviously fascinating, in Herculaneum I found myself considering the atrocities of Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 A.D. and picturing the citizens who lived inside the walls.

Eventually we trudged back to the Circumvesuviana station and headed to the Naples train station, where we got our bags and boarded a train to Roma Termini. We then successfully caught the next Leonardo da Vinci train to Fiumicino, the airport, from whence we snagged a taxi (though unfortunately we ended up paying more than we said we would because we were too exhausted to haggle properly) and ended up, as this post began, at the front doors of the Marriott Courtyard*****.

And so my Italian adventure during the summer of 2009 reaches to an end. Exciting travel – for my travel days are usually the most exciting – to come tomorrow; stay tuned for my final hours from the Italian (no longer Tuscan, as I am in Rome) broadband!

*This came as even more of a surprise since MR and I were actually somewhat forced into McDonald’s for supper. Honestly, the Naples train station has a McDonald’s and a little place that sells baked breakfast breads. I should note that the hamburger I consumed was not much like the ones that the McDonalds’ in the US serve; in place of ketchup and mustard (which were 20 Euro cents extra, and I was not about to shell out $4.00 for a pack of ketchup) was some very strange sauce with peppers in it. Still, it was a hamburger.
**As I am now sitting in a Marriott, you can be relatively well assured that this did not, in fact, happen. The mountain stayed quite quiet. I ended up a little disappointed in the end by its silence. I really thought there was going to be some sort of action – hailing pumice stones at the very least – but there was nothing.
***I’m currently preparing sacrifices in the form of Britney Spears and the entire band of Nine Inch Nails to the music gods just in case they exist, because I know I’m not cut out to be a DJ. I promise, I wasn’t trying to be a DJ. I just thought it was a nice lyrical connection.
****We later discovered that this was because we were given directions on how to drive there, rather than on how to walk there. Really, the walk was only about 8 minutes. It was nice, on the way back, to cut it short a little.
*****Quick shout-out here to MR’s dad, who made the Marriott possible. IT IS AWESOME. Thank you, Mr. R.