It was our last day in Italy (for a few weeks…)….we had accomplished our mission of “roaming” and seeing old stuff.   We decided to make this a trail run of our Eurail Pass and take a day trip on the train.   We arrived bright and early at the station and bought a seat reservation to Naples.    Our plan was to get off at that station and find someone to take us to Pompeii.   How hard could it be, we thought?  Remember that resolution we made day 1 in Rome to plan ahead and know where we’re going before we leave AC and wifi?  Yea, that lasted 2 days obviously….

In Naples, we were surprised to find, once again, that everything was in Italian.   Yes, we are those stupid Americans, but I suppose the stereotype is there for a reason….but this time we were smarter about it and found a tourism office in the station.   The nice lady at the desk handed us a time table for the local train (separate from the Naples metro, which was also at this station), circled the start and stop stations for us, and pointed us downstairs to the ticket booth with encouragement “just down and its on the left!”

We were so proud, we could take the train from Naples to get us to Pompeii—we were great travelers after all and didn’t need some $100 each private tours booked online to get around!  And then we spent 5 minutes trying to buy tickets at a machine for the wrong type of train (turns out it was for their subway) until the annoyed Italian lady waiting behind us waved her hands and pointed us to a ticket desk down on the left….it’s a work in progress I suppose!

Once in Pompeii, we were immediately approached off the train with the promise of a 2 hour walking tour of Pompeii for only 12 Euro…it sounded like a bargain and we knew absolutely nothing about the place beside a mountain blew up there once and covered everything, so we accepted….and were given little stickers to wear and told to follow the lady with the bright pink umbrella…Yup, we had quickly become the people we despise as we travel, the slow moving ones who stop in the middle of small hallways and block everyone else’s way as they are told little stories of a room or a picture for 5 minutes at a time.

Truthfully, I’m glad we took the tour.  (ed. note: So am I.) We would not have known to check out the wheel ruts still in the paved roads from 700 years of the local people continuously using those stoned-paved paths.   We would have missed the knowledge that this town used white rocks inset among the large paver stones as natural streetlights, reflecting the moonlight on the main path from the port gate into the city.  And we would never have known to keep looking down on the road for the phallic pictures, which they used as arrows to point out the route to the red light district!

And in the red light district came my absolute favorite part of being on this Pompeii tour…courtesy of a middle aged Asian man and his iPad as a camera.   As we peered into the small rooms for each lady, our guide explained that the frescas painted above each door represented the position that was the specialty of that woman.  There were some basic ones and some that looked a little more “50 Shades of Gray”…but as the Asian man peered through his iPad screen and zoomed in on one, he proudly proclaimed “That one is Doggie Style!”  Yes, yes it was…