Naples!

Naples

7/2

This morning I woke up in Naples! Or, Napoli, as I should say. The city is one of the largest in Italy, and apparently the dialect of Italian that they speak here is quite different than the Italian I will hear in Rome, which is closer to the Italian you would learn in school. Not that this matters much to me in a practical sense, as I supplement the few necessary expressions I know in Italian by speaking Spanish in an Italian accent and gesturing, but it is interesting. Also, apparently the mafia has control over some of the public works projects in the area (the Campania region of Naples and the surrounding territory), and that combined with the problems of overpopulation in the city has lead to a bit of a crisis. The landfills are too small and too poorly managed to accommodate all the people living here, so trash is piling up in the streets in some places. I saw some today as we were bussing to the aquarium. It’s really surprising to see in Italy, especially with the gorgeous Bay of Naples full of private yachts and main walking streets along the marina with beautiful shops, cafes and restaurants. Here, like in Spain, the people are really beginning to feel the economic recession, although I don’t think we’ll run into any protests here in Naples like we did in Barcelona. Maybe in Rome.

On a side note, some of you may be following the current situation in Greece. As of now, we are still going, and the only disturbances we’re expecting are to our transportation due to strikes. This may put a damper on some of my plans…especially to Santorini, but it’s all part of the experience. In short, don’t worry, SAS won’t take us anywhere they seriously thought would be unsafe (like Egypt).

 This morning was the first time I actually woke up in time for breakfast, and I am quite proud. I’m also now very well-rested, which is good because I will be walking almost all day, every day for the next week or so. After breakfast I met the bus for an SAS-organized trip to the Naples Aquarium as an FDP for my marine biology class. It was the oldest aquarium in the world, and it showed. The aquarium was very small, one large room with a ring of small aquaria around the outside and another in the center, and dark. The aquaria were lit from above, making the tanks seem to glow in the room dimly lit by natural light from small, high windows. The glass was old-fashioned, and the fronts of the aquaria were broken with Roman-style columns. I’m not sure if this effect was aesthetic (it was built a long time ago) or because they couldn’t make panes of glass large and sturdy enough to have one, unbroken sheet as the front of the aquaria. But, one I got over the general strangeness of the place (how different is was from aquariums I’m used to, like Monterrey and Long Beach), it was pretty impressive. They had an incredible array of Mediterranean sea creatures in such a small place. My marine biology professor was there, so I followed him around most of the time because he was full of interesting facts on what we were seeing, and all the signs were only in Italian except the name of the creatures.

One of my favorite creatures was the flying gurnard. There were several varieties, one small rust-colored one in the tank with the seahorses, and another group of about eight-inch long white-silver-translucent ones. Their pelvic fins had evolved to move up under their pectoral fins and lose the webbing between to become what looked like little legs, with which they crawled along the bottom like a silly-looking lobster. Their pectoral fins became giant, but very thin, and they often kept them by their sides, where there weren’t very noticeable, but when they were extended out to their sides, they looked just like wings.

Hermit crabs, ranging from nickel-sized to fist-sized, were in many of the tanks. One of the hermit crabs had a sea anemone on it’s shell, which it apparently could stroke in a certain way to make it let go of its rock and then pick it up with its claws and stick it on its back for extra protection. This made me think of those anti-burglar devices people put outside their homes, but more effective. I also saw a pair of hermit crabs fighting; one was trying to steal the other one’s shell, which I though was very audacious because he was much smaller than the crab with the good shell.

There was a tank full of a type of fish that change sex part way through their lives, although they looked nothing like the sheepshead, a California fish that does this also. Most of the fish in the tank were pinkish females, but one was a bright blue-green male. Apparently, if the male dies one of the largest female will change sex. I bet some of the girls on the ship wish that could happen in humans (remember the 1:3 ratio haha).

We saw a sea turtle and a manta ray in the largest tank, and the ray’s tail was much shorter than it would have been normally, possibly because it was broken when they found it (hopefully not in the process of getting it into the tank). I saw several scorpion fish, which are amazingly well adapted to their environment and blend in perfectly with the seaweed and algae-covered rock substrate. The octopus, too, was amazing to watch as it changed its coloring and patterns as it moved from different colored rocks in its enclosure. This particular octopus had the body about the size of a  football, but really long tentacles that made it look much larger.  In another tank were two types of dogfish (which are actually a kind of shark) lying still on the bottom. They pumped water through their gills to be able to breathe, unlike most other sharks, which must swim to pass water over their gills to stay alive. The grey triggerfish in a tank near the fish that changed sex had an interesting use of fins for propulsion through the water. They had very small pectoral fins, but their pelvic and dorsal fins were large and seemed to undulate to allow them to swim.

One of my new favorite invertebrates is now the sea squirt. Why this lowly, red and yellow sessile filter feeder? Because it is our closest relative among the invertebrates. Not the octopus, which are intelligent enough to predict the winners of the World Cup (well…that one is anyway), the sea squirt. In fact, we share so much of our genes with the sea squirt that researches can use them as a model for our immune system. It’s almost a vertebrate too…it actually has a notochord during development, but it degenerates as the creature matures and it settles for a stationary existence on the sea floor.  Well, I guess some things just like the quiet life (clearly not me).  Along these lines, I learned that sea urchins have all the same genes we do for eyes, but they don’t express them.

Another one of my favorite creatures looked like it was an inspiration for the giant blue spiral plants in Avatar (the ones that suck into the ground when touched).  It was small though, only about an inch and a half of yellow-orange-brown “fan,” which came out of a very unattractive 5 or so inch brown sleeve cemented to the rock. I saw it wiggling its fan to (presumably) catch the particles floating in the water, and the suck itself back into the sleeve when a fish swam by. I thought this was hilarious wand laughed like a weirdo when this happened, causing the Italian parents pointing out fish to their 5-year old to give me a sidelong glace.

This afternoon I went to Pompeii. I have wanted to go to there since I was a little girl watching shows on Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius on Discovery (yes, I did that kind of thing when I was little…explains a lot, right?), and today I came back to the ship covered in the dust of the ancient Roman city. Not just any ancient Roman city, but the most visited in the world, about 3 million tourists a year. That’s three times the population of Naples (which incidentally is Italy’s third most populace city), way more than modern Pompeii’s 45,000 inhabitants and dwarfs ancient Pompeii’s population of 10,000, which I think was pretty good for an ancient city. The infamous eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD buried the city in ash, unlike nearby Herculaneum, which was buried in molten lava. So far, archaeologists have found 2,000 skeletons in the town, so it is likely another 8,000 are left in ancient Pompeii and its surrounding area. Knowing this brought me an eerie, heightened awareness of the people of ancient Pompeii much more acute than any other ancient city ruins I have visited. At times I felt almost like I was being somehow indecent for being so fascinated by the lives of 10,000 people frozen, ended, in an instant. But Pompeii is such a fantastically preserved ancient Roman city that there was no way I could not enjoy the experience. I think its history just made the tour a little darker.

We had a tour guide and little radios so we could hear what she was saying, which is really helpful and allowed me to wander around up little staircases and peek through doorways instead of worrying about keeping up with the tour. Our tour guide, Francesca, lived in modern Pompeii, and was very knowledgeable about the history and layout of the ancient city. First, we saw the gladiator school. It was a small gladiator area surrounded by little rooms, and an area where the gladiators ate and hung out (did ancient Romans hang out?) when they weren’t killing each other for entertainment of the masses. The area was fairly small, with seating for about 500 people I think. There was a larger one at the edge of the city near the gymnasium (those ancient Romans loved their fitness), but it was too far for us to walk on the tour. When Francesca told us this I was a little disappointed, but it really would have been too far…the city was huge and surprisingly well conserved. Full walls are left almost everywhere, with the holes part way up the walls where wooden beams supporting a second story once stood before they disintegrated under hot ash. Some of the streets were very narrow, barely enough room for 2 horses to squeeze through, but others were broad enough to be 2-way streets with chariots trundling down the stone-paves streets. The Romans had their roads, arches, and aqueducts down, but they didn’t have plumbing for waste disposal, at least not for most of the city (some of the wealthy had something along those lines). So, the waste would be dumped in the street, and animals would be walking around the street, so the sidewalks were a good foot and a half above the street line. At street intersections, there are also stepping stones where pedestrians could cross the street without getting in the muck below them—the first crosswalks. The stepping stones were spaced so that chariot wheels could pass on either side. Also, many of the rooms along the street had a half-inch deep groove in the stone along the floor at the entrance. This meant that it was a shop with a folding door that was frequently opened and closed.

We saw a villa of one of the wealthy Pompeii Romans, which was easily three times the size of my house. Francesca asked us if we thought this would be a large villa, and most people said yes, but it turns out that it was on the smaller side: some, including their courtyards, fountains and gardens, were the size of football fields. We saw another amphitheater, which was meant to hold about 1,000 people (although it looked like it would be a tight fit) that originally had a roof because it was meant for music. Another, larger, amphitheater had been restored (the crumbling seats and floors renovated) and today holds outdoor performances of plays. Each of the rows were labeled with a latter and numbered, just like in modern theaters.

We then went to one of the most visited buildings in all of Pompeii: the brothel. This is (hopefully) because the frescoes decorating the interior are almost perfectly preserved. After this, we fittingly took a trip to the public baths, where Francesca told us that the Romans may not have been elegant like the Greeks, but they were great engineers. This was true: the roof of the baths was brilliantly engineered to both let in light to the whole room and kept steam that would collect on the ceiling from dripping back down into the room. There were cool, warm and hot, sauna-like baths, all decorated with frescoes, which were partially still visible and finely carved reliefs along the walls. On our way to the old city square, which was surrounded in ancient times by the most famous public and religious buildings, Francesca pointed out a phallic symbol on the ground. Like good college students, we all snickered. This was, it turns out, a symbol of the Roman Empire that was meant to ward off the evil eye, so they are found carved in the stones on the pavement all over the city. Many of the stones the ancient Romans quarried to make the city were volcanic, and there from the last eruption of Vesuvius. But they had no idea that Vesuvius was actually a volcano even though their homes were built of the proof of its past volcanic activity. After this we went to the fish market, where there was an entire wall of well-preserved frescoes depicting the daily market scenes that would have occurred there 2,000 years ago. Near this fish market was a storage room for artifacts. It was mainly amphorae and statues, but there were a few body casts as well. They were pressure creepy…seeing people in the moment of their death, but they way they were made is cool. People were buried in ash, and then over a few years their bodies disintegrated, leaving bones and an empty cavity in the shape of their body. Archaeologists then poured plaster into these casts, let it dry and pulled out the shape of the person. One of these is an upside down dog, which is pretty creepy especially when you see that Pompeii is full of stray dogs.
On our way out of the city, we exited through the ancient sea gate, where we had a beautiful view of the Bay of Naples. The street was decorated here, in places with fist-sized pieces of reflective shell that were called “cat’s eyes.” They were supposed to reflect the light at night, but Francesca had been here at night and said that they did not, in fact, reflect the light, so they were probably just for decoration.
Outside ancient Pompeii was a cameo factory, which we walked around a little and saw a man carving a cameo from a shell. There were also lots of touristy shops, which I walked around but didn’t get anything from. I did, however, have a delicious pistachio gelato (my first gelato of Italy…likely to be the first of many!)

Tonight we went to Pizzeria Sophi, a restaurant recommended by one of my tour guides today. I had an amazing margarita pizza and delicious red wine with friends. After dinner, we strolled down along the water in Naples. Fireworks were being launched on the beach further along the shore, and some people were making what looked like mini-hot air balloons. My friend told me that these were launched at Thai weddings, but we found the group of people launching them, and it was not a Thai wedding, so apparently that is not their sole place of use. We got to experience the crazy Italian drivers, and some of the crosswalks in Naples don’t have a light to stop the cross traffic, so we found a group of locals and stayed close to them (creepily so in the US…which luckily this is not) to cross the street unscathed. This drivers here are much crazier in Barcelona, where they were similar to California drivers but with much less stopping at stop signs and about equal illegal talking on the cell phone while driving. One of our taxi drivers was on his phone and then said, “Hold on, the police are coming” and put the phone in his lap. But back to Naples…after dinner we went to a safe and sat at a sidewalk café with what felt like ¼ of Naples, with another ¼ passing by on the sidewalk beside us. This made for fantastic people watching, one of my favorites being a young man in a mini who opened his door and tapped the car he was parked next to, causing its alarm to go off. He then, with guilty eyes, looked quickly around and slowly backed into his seat and shut the door to drive away. But, there was either too much traffic to do so or someone had parked in front of him (the parking system here eludes me…they double park on the street, boxing in half the cars), so he just sat there until an older man, presumably the owner of the alarming car (or maybe just an annoyed bystander) tapped on his window. I had a croissant (delicious…warm and about half butter) and limoncello while we chatted and watched everyone walk by for an hour or so, and then headed back to the ship.

Our dock here in Naples is extremely convenient. We are a 2 minute walk from the ferry (which I will be taking to go to Capri tomorrow!), 30 seconds from an internet café (you know what that means…picture uploads on Facebook for real this time!), and about 10 minutes to lots of delicious restaurants and cafes.


7/3

Today I had no SAS-planned trips, so two of my friends and I decided to take the 9:10am ferry to the island of Capri, just a 45 minute ride from Naples. It seemed like most of the ship had the same idea, because in line for the ferry, on the ferry and all over Capri, we saw SASers.

The first thing I thought of when I arrived at Capri was how much it reminded me of Catalina. I’m not sure if this is just because Catalina is by far the island I am the most familiar with, but the general shape and layout of the harbor (with the large pier for ferries in the center and smaller ones to the outside, and then with moorings spread throughout) as well as the way the city began with a cobblestoned main street right above the rocky beach, in line with all the piers and docks, and then quickly tiered up the steep hillside, reminded me so much of Avalon on Catalina. The water at Capri, however, was a brighter blue in the deep areas and a brilliant teal where it was shallow and free of reefs. Also, there was a very swanky dock full of yachts that would look more at place in Newport Harbor or Monte Carlo than Catalina. One was even adorned with 3 foot flower arrangements flanking the doorways on two of its decks. I think you will be proud, Mom and Dad, that the first thing I thought when I saw these was “How ridiculous, you could never tie those down under way.”

We hadn’t eaten yet that day, so we met up with a few other friends and sat down at a café by the water. I had (surprise!) hot chocolate and a brioche, and had the hugest smile on my face the entire time I was eating/drinking them…it was so evident that one of my friends took a picture to prove it. The hot chocolate was very tasty and different than I have had in Europe so far. They served it quite bitter and with sugar on the side so you could add as much as you wanted, which was great for me because I like my hot chocolate not too sweet. The brioche was fresh and so delicious, I think I’ll be getting one every day I’m here since I have seen them at pretty much every café and street snack stand. So, with that and the copious amount of pizza and pasta I’ll be eating here in Italy, don’t be surprised if I come back a little rounder than I left ☺ 

We came to Capri armed with swimsuits and towels (and sunscreen of course), so after our breakfast we took the short walk down to the beach on the left of the pier. Like so many wave-less island beaches, the beach was rocky. And by rocky, I mean it was just rocks. The only sand (and it barely qualified as such) was right at the water edge along the length of the beach. It was also a very thin beach, which made it seem every more crowded than it already was. Luckily, it was apparently not a topless beach, because there were lots of leathery old sunbathers and I really got my fill of that in my stroll on the beach in Barcelona. We found a good spot to lay down our towels all the way at the end of the beach, laid in the sun for a bit to warm up, and then went for a swim. The water felt perfect to me, although one of my friends, who was from Florida, complained that it was too cold. What a baby ☺

After our beach time, we cruised around the main street along the water, looking for an ATM (which was broken, and the bank was closed and the only other ATM in the city was all the way at the top of a giant hill). We were able to use credit cards where we needed to make purchases, though, so we all survived. We talked to a few friends who had just come from a boat tour around the island who said it was fantastic, so we walked along the beach looking for the best deal. Once we found him, the three of us set off in his navy blue hulled, about 25-foot powerboat with a giant, padded deck at the bow, which made a perfect sunbathing platform. Capri is famous for its grottos: the blue grotto, the green grotto, the white grotto, and red grotto and the coral grotto. They are partially underwater caves that, due to different substrates or types of rock making up the cave, seem to glow different colors. Unfortunately, it was too rough for us to swim into the blue grotto today, but we did get to see it and (between swells, where it would turn white with foam) could see its brilliant blue color inside. We did get to swim at the white grotto, which was huge and had stalactites and stalagmites, and at the green grotto, which you all must put on your bucket list.  It was so beautiful…my friend had an underwater camera, so he took pictures and video that will at some point be on Facebook. From the outside, the grotto glows a vibrant sea foam green and seems like it’s a cave with no exit. But, once we swam inside, were enough green light emanated from beneath us to light up the whole cavern and we could see there was an exit: a tall, narrow crack in the rock face. The sound inside the grotto was one of my favorite things: the waves echoed up the walls as they swept in and out from the two entrances. The whole boat tour was about 2 ½ hours around whole island, and we stopped to swim at a few grottos and stopped to look at others where it was a little too rough to get in the water.

After the tour we were tired and hungry, but very happy, so we were content to plop down at a street side café with a very friendly waiter, who by the end of our meal wrote down his first and last name and insisted we friend him on Facebook. I wish I could say this was the first time this had happened…but apparently European waiters and bartenders are very fond of this particular social networking tool. I had a bellini (Gin 1, family 0) and a caprese panino, both of which were delicious. The sandwich was much larger than I was expecting, and while it was technically lunch (although it was about 5:30), was still full when I got back to Naples today around 9.

One sad piece of news from the day: I totally have a sunglasses tan. But if that’s the worst Capri is going to throw at me, I will gladly take it.

Back in Naples, I was exhausted and cakes with multiple layers of salty seawater, so I was relieved to get back on the ship to shower, rest and get caught up on my blog. It’s getting tough to stay caught up…but so far I’ve written every day, so I really want to continue to do so throughout the trip so I don’t loose any details.


7/4

Happy 4th of July! Today I am having a relaxing day to catch up on internet stuff. So, enjoy the new pictures I posted on Facebook! I’m giving them captions that should match up to my blog, so hopefully you can read the blog and look at the pictures together. However, some sites are coming up in only Italian, like my blog website, so I’m hoping that the buttons I’m pushing are actually going to publish this blog post. So far, speaking Spanish with an Italian accent has worked fairly well, but this morning it was definitely a fail when I was talked to the waiter at the Internet café. But that may have just been because I was ordering wine at 2pm.

We get back on the ship at 6pm today, and once aboard we have a 4th of July BBQ, so yes I will be celebrating even though I’m in Europe. At 8pm today, we will leave Naples for Civitavecchia, the port near Rome!

As always, I love hearing from you all, so if you haven’t done so already…or if it’s been a week or so, please email me at vescholtes@semesteratsea.net with how you are doing ☺

Love from Naples,
Ginny