Years of Poems and Spirits

Leaving Rome. Some aspects of Rome were really irritating: the trash on the streets and the noise (for example, in addition to the mopeds and car alarms, apartment burglary alarms would go off in the middle of the night somewhere. They were meant to be heard from a satellite I thought). The city was pretty tricky for a first time visitor too. For example, if you forget to validate your 75 cents bus ticket on the bus, you can be fined for 52 euros. We were fined for not reserving seats on a train — yet no-one nowhere in the train station prompted us to. The travel consultants gave us more guidances (against threft on Roman buses) than a ski instructor would to his first time students. Than again, the museums were great. So I guess visiting Rome is kind of like going to your dentist: you know it is good for your health but it is such a pain.

After Rome, we travelled south to Sorrento. On our way there, we visited Pompeii. It was a striking site, especially when I stood in the town square, facing the temples and had Mount Vesuvius menacingly in the background. The story of the town was well known so it attracted huge crowds. The hotspot was the ancient brothel: it still had cubicles of ancient sex workers … actually their beds, and paintings on the well, which served the same function as porn videos and magazines in fertility clinics today. It was packed, today too. I had to stand outside and listen to the descriptions through multiple tour guides’ megaphpnes in different languages … quite an experience indeed.

Actaully, coming out of Rome, Pompeii just gave you a sense of how uneventful life in a provincial town must had been. There weren’t any colossal public monuments, the roads were just wide enough for two wagons to squeeze by. Close to town center, the prime location one would thought, there were large food stands where people could buy hot food. At the end of the town, there was a beautiful villa, called Mistery Villa. It was very large and some rooms still had original frescos painted on them. I thought those frescos were finer than the ones I saw in Roman Museum in Rome. When wandering around the villa, I came upon a small, dark and locked room. In the middle of the room there was a cast of the dead resident from the eruption. It was eery. I almost cried “I saw dead people!”

Pompeii has two threaters. The bigger one could hold 5000 people and the smaller one 1000. They were currently being restored.

We arrived in Sorrent in late afternoon. We decided to take a bus to our hotel as everyone told us the town’s Mercedes taxi fleet was way too expensive. As in Rome, nobody could give us a definitive answer as of which bus would go where or when it would arrive. You go around asking the old man at newstand where you buy bus tickets or the train station clerks, the answers all end the same, “just wait there and the bus will come”. Of course, the lack of information naturally fermented a community out of dozens of anxious, disoriented tourists gathered at the bus stop. Finally, as the local sage predicted, the bus did arrive.

Sorrento and Pompeii were at the two ends of a laaarge bay. Unlike Pompeii, Sorrento resides on steep coastal hill. You sit in their buses, the bus runs and turns. After 5 minutes, the bus will come to the same spot where you left, but much higher. The nice thing about this is, almost every hotel in the town has ocean view. Ours was no exception, plus Mt. Vesuvius. We had dinner in a small restaurant, looking over a moonless sea. The hilly road must be too steep for mopeds, the town was very quiet in the night.