Today was a little ridiculous. I'll describe it in a format a little differently from the previous posts...
5:30 AM: Wake up to catch early bus to Amalfi.
6:30 AM: Get on bus to Amalfi, Surprisingly, there are no crowds this early in the morning.
8:45 AM: Arrive in Amalfi. Turns out that many school children who live on the coast take this bus to Amalfi where they wait for another bus to take them to school.
9:00 AM: Get on bus to Salerno, and this is when we caught a glimpse of how serious the storms were yesterday. A beach near Amalfi was a disaster zone - literally. There were at least 10 cars on the beach that looked like they had been in fatal accidents (they had just been parked near the beach and the rough waters threw them around - they were totaled). Several of the cars were buried under the sand (up to their roofs), and one was even out in the water. Half of the beach was gone compared to yesterday...
10:30 AM: Arrive in Salerno. Go to the train station to catch a train to Paestum, but find out that there is a strike and none of the trains are running (luckily, I had learned the word for "strike" in Italian...the train station agent didn't speak English). Find out that there is a bus to get us to Paestrum.
11:00 AM: Get on bus to Paestum. Driving through Salerno was not much different than what we saw in Napoli. But, we did see our first McDonalds, our first Chinese/Japanese restaurant, and a traveling zoo - two camels, a tiger, and a trailer for giraffes.
12:30 PM: Arrive in Paestum (pronounced Paystoom), our destination. We saw some more ominous clouds in the distance so grabbed some lunch to avoid the storm.
1:15 PM: Finally, we entered the Paestum ruins. These are Greek and Roman ruins - the Greeks lived here as early as 600 BC, and the Romans were here in 300 BC. After the Romans, malaria infected mosquitoes took over - and the area was basically deserted for over 1,000 years. Then, in the 18th century, it was rediscovered and is now one of the best collections of Greek temples. Luckily for us, the Romans were pretty superstitious people - whenever they conquered an area, they left any religious and spiritual buildings untouched. We were able to see three Greek temples and a memorial tomb. Around these items, the Romans built their typical city - very similar to Pompeii. There was the forum, amphitheater, residential areas, but the new item we saw was a very large swimming pool. All in all, it was quite an impressive site, and only one fifth has been excavated. Of course, the most exciting part was the torrential downpour that took place just after we started our visit to the site. We ran for cover under a tree (not many things that provide cover in an excavation site), and when it really started to pour we waited it out with several other tourists in the women's restroom. For thirty minutes.
4:00 PM: Got on the bus back to Salerno.
5:15 PM: We wanted to avoid going back to Amalfi and suffering through the bus-madness that we have endured the last two days, so we took a different bus to Pompeii, where we could catch the train back to Sorrento.
6:00 PM: Got on bus to Pompeii. Asked the driver to tell us where the closest stop was to where we wanted to go.
7:20 PM: Bus driver pulls over and turns off the bus. Everyone is talking, we have no idea what is going on. Another bus drives by - everyone (except us) runs off the bus onto the other one. The driver is on the phone so we can't talk to him. Finally, he gets off the phone and I asked him, "What about us?". Turns out - the bus just broke down, and he had forgotten about us. I asked if we were close enough to walk to the train station - he said we were - it was only 4 km away - straight down the street. Simple enough, eh? Well, "straight" isn't really "straight" in Italian, turns out. The road had forks in it all over the place, but after asking 10 people, block after block, we finally made it to "a" train station. Not the one we wanted, but it worked.
8:00 PM: Got on train. Transferred a few stops later to the train we needed to get back to Sorrento.
9:00 PM: Finally - back in Sorrento. For doing a lot of sitting around it was an exhausting day!
Gelato Gusti per il Giorno:
Mike - Twix e Coccialo (Twix and various chocolates)
Aviva - Cannella e Menthe (cinnamon and mint)
I love this post. What a crazy day!
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