7:22pm: Today we walked around and stuff. I dunno, Polermo doesn’t have a tonne of places to go to. Just churches and stuff. It’s a bit of a down ending, but that’s all we really did. Really. Yeah. We also had the worst pizza I’ve ever had in Italy. It was so bland and tough. I slammed my knife on the bread and it bounced right back up! It was so bad! Anyway, I guess I’ll just say that overall the trip has been good, visiting all these popular landmarks and things. I will say that finding a variety of food is tough, especially on a long trip like this, but there are a lot of cool things to see. One thing I will say is that it helps learning Italian. I dunno, I heard someone say that most Italians know English. That’s not true, most Italians know a few words, like my knowledge of Italian. Also, knowing a bit of Latin only helps in reading the ancient ruin text and stuff, because Italian has changed a lot of the words. At least you know what left and right are though. Also, besides Milan, the temperature was pretty cool at around 12 degrees Celsius (Milan was around 5), so it wasn’t freezing cold this trip, even if it was winter. Anyway, I guess I’ll see you guys back in Sydney! We’re just packing up stuff and things, ready to be on the plane at around lunchtime tomorrow. See you guys in about 2 and a bit days!
7:43pm: Ugh, I’m so tired. I really need an early night. Anyway, tomorrow is the last day we’re gonna do stuff in Italy. I know, the trip is coming to an end! Anyway, today we went to a church. It was the Duomo di something. I dunno, but it had a style like the Palatine on the inside. Except now it’s a lot larger, lots of mosaics everywhere! Woah! It was pretty cool. Too bad I couldn’t walk everywhere because there was a sermon on (because it’s Sunday). We also went to some Catacombs. I thought it’d be pretty cool, but unfortunately, it was literally shelves of skeletons. It was a bit creepy, but yeah. I can’t really talk about, just imagine a library of skeletons. Yeah, it was scary. Anyway, tomorrow we’re doing stuff. I think tomorrow will be my last post before I get home because I’ll be on a bunch of planes and there’ll be no internet. :O Anyway, I’ll see you tomorrow!
7:58am (a day late): Yeah, I fell asleep…but for good reason. We got back at like 7:30pm after doing the stuff today, and then we went out for dinner shortly later and got back at 11:30pm, and I just fell asleep. Anyway, yesterday we went around Polermo. It’s a bit like Milan, but a bit like Florence, nice good streets, but not really any high-rise buildings, you know? Anyway, we went around to a nice museum, which I think is a place that is still used for government stuff. Anyway, in there we say the Palatine Chapel, which is a room completely covered in mosaics, and it’s just spectacular. A lot of the pieces are gold coloured, which are very shiny. Anyway, that was pretty cool. I noticed that outside that place there was a Merry-Go-Round, with a Pikachu as a car. And not like you ride on Pikachu, you ride in Pikachu, as in it was a car. How do you get the licensing to get Pikachu and turn it into a car on a Merry-Go-Round? Anyway, we then walked around a bit and had really late lunch. I had the last gelato of the challenge (to eat gelato at every city I stayed at), so that means I win bragging rights. I can safely say Milan had the best gelato, or at least to my source. :D Anyway, walking to the stores, we saw like 500 birds just swarming around in the air. The blob didn’t really move anyway, but it was amazing to see the birds moving. They moved together for the most part, so it was like two big bodies of birds just flying around. It was pretty cool. Anyway, today we’re going to do stuff. I don’t know what but I’ll see you later today!
7:05pm: I’m on the train to Polermo, we’re arriving there in about 20 minutes. However, I’ve been on the train since 10am. The train ride started out nice and sunny. The train was room based, meaning you had a door and stuff for your set of seats. As we ventured on, some clouds came over. We were still wondering why the ship yesterday would be afraid of this. And now, there’s lightning bolts outside the window and hail. Thank goodness we got the train, we would’ve never left Naples on a boat! Anyway, I’ve just been on this laptop here playing some OpenTTD and FreeCiv (because this laptop can’t run Civilization 5 because it has no DirectX 10). Anyway, they’ve been fun, but we didn’t really have anything done today. Still, we saved some time, since we’ve got the whole of the next few days before we’re taking the plane back. I think we have 3 whole days to do stuff. Anyway, I have to stop, because I need to breathe outside the train. There’s no rule that says you can’t smoke on a train, and I think that someone has gone through five boxes of cigarettes. Ugh. Anyway, see you guys through the hail!
8:28pm: Today, we went around Naples. We took the foot to around town, where we went to the s**tiest part of town. Literally, there was dog poop everywhere. We intended to go up to a museum, but when half the ground is poop, there’s no where to walk up. Doesn’t anyone clean up their poop? Anyway, we then went around and stuff. We found some lunch at this place. It was nice and all, but my Mum got a very big plate of salad stuff for 2 euro 50. It was a bit bad because the menu was all in Italian, but I think that two words isn’t enough to say per person. This is because the waiter didn’t understand us, so he got 4 servings of the salad, when we only wanted one. We didn’t know though. When we got the bill, we kind-of complained that we were getting ripped off 7 euro 50. And then the manager came out and actually threatened to call the police. I know it probably is a serious affair that they’re losing money, but, one, it was their error of interpreting us, two, it was a bit bad of us for not knowing that it was more than we had ordered for, and three, the fact that they’re calling the police over a loss of 7 euro 50. We paid it anyway. We then went on a taxi to the boat station to get our ship to Polermo. And then the man at the front said that the ship was delayed until tomorrow due to bad weather, even though it was only wet on the ground (not raining). I guess it is storming tomorrow, but no boats full stop. Anyway, we had the option of staying on the boat for the night, but we decided to come back to the hotel for another night. We’re taking the possibility of taking a plane train tomorrow, getting to Polermo around 4pm (we would’ve been there at 7am). We’re missing a day of going around Polermo, but we’re still fine. Anyway, I’ll see you guys in Polermo!
6:36pm: Today, we checked out the Amalfi Coast. Instantly what comes to mind for me is the track Costa d’Amalfi from Gran Turismo 4. Oh my gosh that track was a nightmare to drive on. Thankfully that it’s only in the special events courses, which is a completely optional section that is only worth specific cars and money. One cool thing is that you can do from the start of the game is to go and get the A license to get the Pontaic Sunfire GXP Concept ‘02, which is powerful enough to easily win the Costa d’Amalfi Easy event. This event consists of clearing two laps of the track front and back (separately). The reward is the Toyota RSC Rally Raid Car ‘02, which is a good car in itself, but it also sells for 250 thousand credits, which is a lot considering the 4 rare black cars cost 8.2 million credits for all of them, which are very good vehicles. You could get the money for this in around 7 hours of starting the game. Repetitive, yes, but considering that you’re usually playing the game for several hundred hours before you can get this amount of money normally, you can save a lot of time. Anyway, what was I talking about? So the coast, like Gran Turismo, was thin as. It didn’t help that people were parked along here. Anyway, the road here is very narrow and windy, since that it basically sticks to the mountain-side. Anyway, we saw some towns on the way, and it was a very cool experience. One thing is that if you lived here, you’d get a cool view no matter wherever your house was. Unfortunately, the main income here is tourism, and it’s not tourism season yet, so a lot of stuff was closed. It was still pretty cool anyways. So I just have to say that we’re doing stuff tomorrow before getting on the ferry overnight late at night. That means that I’m gonna look around Naples a bit more tomorrow, so I’ll talk about that then. Anyway, see you guys!
8:01pm: Today we went early to around Naples. You know, churches and stuff. We also checked out the narrow streets and stuff. I love it how the street is one lane and with enough side room for one person. Anyway, there’s a nice view of Mount Vesuvius from some of these hills which is nice. So nice we went there. Or at least the town of Pompeii, which is a town very close to it. It’s in ruins, which is cool. There were people covered in the ash, who have been excavated, which is cool, but most of them are in museums. The broken buildings were also pretty cool. A few of them had ovens and stuff for pizza. We didn’t go up the mountain because there isn’t really any place to eat up there. So, we just came back and hung out for the time being. I’m getting very homesick right now, but the time is coming soon. We’re heading out of Naples on Thursday to our final city of Polermo before we’re on our flights home, but it has been a very long trip. Anyway, I’ll see you guys later. See you!
7:26pm: I’m in Naples, and I’m ready to talk about it. Anyway, we caught our last planned train (we booked the trains between places before the trip, but we might catch a train to get to other places such as Pomepeii, etc.) of the trip, so I’m a bit excited. Overall, I’ve been a little disappointed with the trains. While they were nice smooth trips, there were a lot of problems dealing with our luggage. Firstly, not every carriage has luggage areas. While there are overhead racks to place your luggage, we had too much to put them up, especially big suitcases wouldn’t fit up there. There are also spaces between the backs of two seats, butt there’s not many of these to put all of our suitcases in. Finally, there’s so many smokers at the stations. Naples was okay, but when we were getting on the train, literally 5 smokers got out of every carriage and started smoking up every drop of air. Gosh, I couldn’t breathe. Anyway, Naples is a lot like Rome, but that may be because it was the only other city that it’s rained in. I haven’t seen much of it. One thing I can say is that if you want pizza, Naples does it best. The one I had for lunch was probably the best one I’ve had so far in Italy, and it was 3 euro (usually 8 euro or something). Anyway, we’re out to Pompeii tomorrow, so I’ll see you guys there! Well, I’ll see you not there but I’ll talk to you about that. Anyway, bye!
5:54pm: Today was a bit rugged. I dunno how to start these blogs without jumping right into what I did that day, so anyway…today we checked out the back of the Roman Forum and stuff. I dunno, we just went to see the damage of the New Year. There are broken glass bottles everywhere, there are the occasional still standing glass bottle, and that’s about it. The firecrackers clean up quickly, thank goodness, but the glass will probably take a while to clean. As we were crossing a river, we saw a bunch of stuff in the river, a bit stuck because of the flow. Three soccer balls and a lot of other stuff. Yeah, I’m a bit glad I’m leaving Rome. I unfortunately find the place to be more dirtier than other Italian cities, and I’d prefer other cities. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hating Rome, there’s a lot of cool stuff to see in Rome, but once you’re done with that, I think you’re done with Rome. Anyway, I’m off to Naples tomorrow. I’m hopefully going to enjoy it. See you guys then!
7:01pm: I’m crazy. Since 11am, I’ve been posting a tweet saying “Happy New Year to everyone in (country name)!”. It’s been 8 hours and I’ve done several tweets, which I’m gonna do Nepal in 13 minutes. Anyway, today we went to several fountains and plazas and stuff. We saw a big Christmas tree at a round-about, and we saw the police get very mad and blew their whistles at pedestrians who were using the walkway. Yeah, they must’ve been in a hurry. I dunno, but yeah it’s busy around Rome, and there’s people throwing firecrackers and stuff all over the place. It’s dangerous, and I really wanted to stay in today. But anyway, we’ve got some cool stuff possibly coming up in Naples when we arrive on the 2nd. I guess until then, happy new year everyone and have a very good 2012.
