Napoli.

I woke up Saturday morning to the sun shining brightly in my face from Sean opening the window shades. I have to note that with the windows and shades closed you could pretty much sleep for days with no interruption. They black out the light and silence the loud city. Good thing for sleeping in late, but also a little dangerous. After another rainy Friday night, we were happy to see a sunny Saturday morning. With tons of homework in our school bags, and finals right around the corner, we decided to avoid it all and go on a day trip to Napoli. So, we got in gear, downed our cappuccino, crossed the street to Termini and hopped on the next train out of town. When we arrived in Napoli, it almost felt like walking into TJ. Overbearing, shady street vendors lined the sidewalk selling useless nick nacks. Garbage was blowing everywhere, as if trash cans never existed. And if anything looked like it may have been remotely interesting at one time, graffiti now covered it. It was really a sad site to see. A lot of homeless begging for money...a lot of sad souls. However, as we continued walking, we found Napoli to be a pretty cool city. We found a bustling, crowded area with trendy shops and some amazing architecture. We made it to the waterfront to see some ancient castles sitting upon the water along with a breathtaking view of mountains in the distance. Napoli is known for being the birthplace of pizza...and therefore having the best pizza in the world! We were actually really excited to be apart of this, and got a couple slices. The pizza was good, but lacking in mozzarella. I guess thats how its done there. Lots of sauce, little cheese. After we ate, we passed a couple more pizzarias with huge crowds of Italians lined out the door, and regretted our hasty choice for dinner. We just figure we will have to go back for another slice at one of the popular places in town. Another thing we saw were some unreal looking pastries. Every time we passed a pasticcerie, the cakes, the canolli, the chocolate, the colorful, glazed fruit made us salivate and stare in a trance at the lovely deserts. The sweets were everywhere, and definitely calling us back for another visit to Napoli. We did indulge in a torrone, a white, nuggetty bar with hazelnuts and chocolate in the center. We ate the whole bar throughout the day, no problem. We saw the ugliest dog in the world. I am not kidding. I love pets just as much as the next person, but this was truly a dog only a mother could love. It was HUGE! As we walked by wondering if it was even a dog, it slowly picked its head up and looked up at us, and I ran in horror. Sean thought it was a boar and tried to pet it. I can only be glad we passed it again, so I could take a picture. Napoli is also full of librerie (book stores), which were all packed. Guess thats a good thing, but it was just strange to see millions of packed bookstores one after another. Maybe a new book was launching and we were missing out or something. Anyway, at least everyone is literate in Naples. After a full day we nearly got run over by about 40 motos on our way back to the station. Sean bought us the wrong train tickets and it took us about 3 hours to get home (it should have been only 1 hr. 40 min)...I wont go into details about how I got us fined 13 euro each on the way there for buying the wrong tickets...thats another blog entry. Anyway, Napoli was an interesting place. It could use to be cleaned up, but we appreciated the realness of the city. It was very Italian, and under the thick layer of roughness and garbage, it was actually very bello.