I hope you all didn't stop following this

Hi everyone! Sorry for the huge space between posts. I don't think we realized how busy we would be here. I don't know how we fit everything into our schedules! Last weekend we all went to the region of Italy called Campania where we visited the Naples Archaeological Museum. The majority of statues there are from Pompeii which is where we went the next day. We stayed in a hotel in Stabiae which is a little town down the bay from Naples and closer to Pompeii. On Saturday we got up nice and early and headed down to Pompeii and spent a few hours walking around the excavated city, which was so cool. It turns out that the pumice and ash that rained from the sky that day in 79 AD was perfect for preserving many of the buildings and sometimes even the wood that was left in the city. There are also some preserved frescoes and mosaics still left over. We got to run excitedly into their amphitheater and pretend to fight each other to the death, and also to see the theater where they would have gathered thousands of people to watch plays. That afternoon, they gave us the choice to go back to campus on the bus or to go off and travel by ourselves for the rest of the weekend. So, Nico went back to campus and I went with ten other people to see Sorrento and the island of Capri in the Bay of Naples. We took our three euro train to Sorrento and after some confusion and going in circles and getting lost, we found our "deluxe hostel" which we didn't expect much from for 17 euro a night. But, it was a nice treat to find out that it was nicer than many American hotels I've been in, so we took advantage of the bathtub and the hot showers, which we don't get here on campus. Hostels are usually set up like dorms so one female room will have 6 or 8 or 10 bunkbeds and one bathroom, so all 5 of us girls got to sleep in one room. We went to Mass that night in the Cathedral of Sorrento and then got some pizza and went to a fake Irish Pub with a crazy bartender. He probably wasn't really crazy, he was just overly excited that we were there I guess. Then on Sunday we took a hydrofoil to the island of Capri. The ride was windy and rainy but we loved the boat ride. It was amazing to see Vesuvius fade behind us as the island emerged in front of us, and we didn't mind the rain much. We got off of the boat and hiked up the cliff that leads to downtown Capri in the rain. It wasn't easy, but we made it too the top and saw the beautiful views. We just walked around the city all day and then caught a ferry back to Naples, walked about 40 minutes to the train station, took an almost 3 hour train back to Rome and then stopped at McDonalds at the terminal, but I refused to eat McDonalds for the equivalent of eight dollars for a meal, then took the metro to the bus and finally made it home at around 9:30. Even with all the traveling it was an amazing trip and I'm glad we went and I learned a lot about firstly, the differences between Northern Italy and Southern Italy and about how to travel well. Naples was the dirtiest city I have seen while being here and rivals any American city I've ever been to. It's full of ugly apartment complexes and the downtown is just dirty and crime-ridden. Capri and Sorrento were beautiful, but the Northern Italians still look down on all of Southern Italy and call them their equivalent of hick or redneck. And for traveling I learned it's good to have maps of the city and some idea of where you need to go once you arrive in the city you're visiting and that it's much better to travel in smaller groups. This way it's easier to plan, easier to walk around and easier to be less conspicuously American. All in all, it was really fun, we had a good group, and I would definitely reccomend Sorrento to anyone for a quiet and beautiful trip to Italy. I'll put a few pictures up below, but I think since most of you have facebook, or access to it, it might be easier to put pictures up there for eveyone to see and I'll also paste the links to the albums here so even people without facebook can see them.

Love you all!

Angela