Thursday in Pompeii

Thursday, April 2, 2009 Pompeii
Another beautiful day in sunny Italy… This morning we had breakfast at the hostel with our friends Wallis and Jenny. Then it was off to the grocery store to purchase our picnic lunch of bread and bananas… this time we added some chocolate for desert. By 11 AM we were at the train station waiting for the train that would take us and our companion for the day, Wallis, to Pompeii.
The local guides tried to talk us into their tours but we elected to use our handy Rick Steve’s book and Martha’s knowledge from prior visits to find our way around the old city. By doing our own tour we were able to stay longer at each site while reading the book that explained what we were looking at as we watched the guided tours zoom right past us as the guides hurried them along so they could get a new group as quickly as possible.
Highlights (most interesting) in Pompeii would have to be the Pizza Ovens & Bakery with the brothel coming in a close second…… just amazing to see what a large city it was so long ago and its so well preserved after being buried in ash for such a long time. You will have to check out the slide show on Martha’s blog site to see pictures from our tour. The body casts that they made from hollow areas in the earth that formed where bodies had
Died in the hot ash & lava and then decayed made you realize the horror that these people went through……….
We were on the train and back to the hostel by late afternoon…… saw Tom, from Australia, rushing down the street to find a phone as he just got back from a day in Sorrento when he realized that his wallet was missing. He had gone back to the last store that he has used it… to find it closed (many stores do this during the afternoon) so he assumed that it must have been taken by a pickpocket. We told him to come back with us and he could use our world skype phone system (on our computers) to call his bank and credit card company. Thank heavens his passport was not in his wallet. He spent the next hour doing the necessary paper work over Martha’s computer phone . Meanwhile, we Grandma’s had been trying to cheer up Wallis (who had spent the day with us) as yesterday her IPOD (this is her phone, computer, GPS, watch…it’s one of those new ones that just about has everything on it but the kitchen sink) had gotten completely soaked in the rain and was not working. She used our my computer to check on going home a week earlier than planned and talked with her Mother…. But found that she could not change her plane ticket very easy so we convinced her to at least wait until tomorrow to see how she feels about staying on and finishing her trip as planned… besides maybe when her IPOD dried out it might start working. We talked a lot about how during our early travel days we had neither cell phones or computers…… nor digital cameras. Then we got into how we had gotten our first computers and what it was like to see the Electronic Age develop during the last 25 years (when these two kids were babies).
Tom went back to the room to rest awhile before dinner while we continued to talk with Wallis… all of a sudden Tom was asked to come downstairs….a man (from the last shop he was at) had found his wallet in the store where it must have dropped …… He saw his room key with the hostel name on it and drove all the way here from Sorrento to return it to Tom… everything was still in the wallet…. Having something like this happen restores your faith in mankind. ….Wallis went to her room and brought back a great bottle of wine which the four of us shared before going downstairs for Dinner. Guess What…. Friday morning her IPOD is starting to work again…not without being plugged in but she is again feeling “connected” and is going to finish her trip as planned……