Pompei

My original plan for this past weekend was to go to Oktoberfest. Unfortunately, due to poor planning and EXPENSIVE housing, it wasn't possible. Now that I'm not going, I can tell the way that we talked about going: flying to Frankfurt, renting a car, and driving down to Munich on the autobahn in an automatic minivan. Once we got to Munich, we were going to sleep in tents until Sunday, when we would take an overnight train home (12 hours). I, of course, would not have been driving, but it would have been at lot of fun. Carlos (one of the students from UF) used to live in Berlin so he knows about driving in Germany, but that still doesn't make our plan any less ridiculous. There were about 8 of us trying to do this.

So instead of all that, I stayed in Rome. On Saturday I went to the Castel Sant'Angelo because it was raining and it was the closest museum to our dorms. It was pretty cool. They had an exhibit on Egypt's influence on Rome, which is pretty obvious once you get here. There are more obilisks in Rome than in Egypt because the emperors stole them all. Also, there are temples to Egyptian gods and goddesses, particularly Isis. We call Castel Sant'Angel the Hadrian castle because most things we've studied here were built by Hadrian, like the Trajan forum and the Pantheon. Anyway, the Castle was cool. The bottom half was built to be a massoleum for Trajan, but got turned into a castle for the Popes later on. There is a bridge between the castle and the Vatican in case Vatican city ever gets attacked. We tried to get onto it, but (logically) they've got it blocked off. The view from the top of the Castle is great. Not exactly worth the 8.50 euro I paid to get in, but a good afternoon nontheless.

On Sunday I went to Pompei, which is about three hours south of Rome, near Napoli. We left Termini (the Rome train station) at 7:15 in the morning. The train was delayed for half an hour, we didn't get to explore Naples like we wanted, but in the end I think it was for the better. There were three Italian men on the train that started talking to us. One was creepy and old and missing teeth but the other two were cool. One was about our age from Milan, and the other was about my dad's age. The guy from Milan spoke a little English, so he translated what I couldn't. They told us not to speak English in Napoli or else the pickpockets swarm you. And to get the Margherita pizza, because its the best. Oh, and Napoli has the best pizza in the world. We ate pizza in the train station and it was good because the sauce was different, but I knew that if we'd gotten the chance to explore we could've had better. The pizza we had in Pompei was more like what I though Napoletano pizza would be like. The sauce was runny and there was no cheese and lots of garlic. I liked it better.

Pompei is beautiful. We went on a clear, sunny day and the view was perfect. The ruins span a huge area, which isn't that surprising considering it was a city. There were a lot of pretty well conserved houses that still had frescoes on the walls. You could see Mt Vesuvius (in the picture) perfectly. Pompei must be an archeologist's dream because there is so much that is still there, unaltered by time (only lava and ash). What I liked is that you got a real sense of what a Roman town looked like before it was dominated and changed by Christianity. Everything in Rome has been "popeified" because of the sharp change in religion, and while the churches are beautiful, the old ruins were scavenged for the marble and bronze it took to make those churches beautiful.
It was nice to have the "Temple of Jove" instead of the "Church that used to be the Temple of Jove." I'm glad I went.

Tomorrow my mom and her friend Pam are arriving in Rome. By chance, my art class is meeting pretty near where their hotel is, so I'm going straight from class, around noon, to meet them. I'm excited to show them around. We're going to Florence on Friday, making a side trip to Parma at some point (Monday?) and then going to Venice. I'm excited!

ps. I put a link to my pictures on the blog. They're on the side where it says, "pictures for Italy"