I knew it! I knew it was a mistake not to get Rome information out to everyone last night. I even had this thought in the back of my head - "You know, G, it would probably be a good idea to confirm with everyone about Rome before you go to bed tonight." Unfortunately, that thought occurred roughly two seconds before my head hit the pillow and consequently dribbled out my ears. Actually, even that's not quite an excuse, because I had the thought again this morning before I left the ship. So really I can't attribute today's madness to anything except flat-out destructive self-sabotage.
Okay, okay, why don't we start at the beginning. (I notice, by the way, that I seem to follow this format quite often on this travelogue. I tend to start off with some sort of blanket statement, usually quite agitated, about the current state of things, then insist that I need to start from the beginning. Maybe I ought to just start at the beginning instead of ranting? Oh, but it's so much fun listening to myself verbally gesticulate in frothing madness!)
Anyway, today was Sorrento, which had several options as far as interesting sites to visit. However, I had already decided on Pompeii sometime last night, and after hearing my announcement Sumrall kindly lent me a few books about the area. I cheerfully glanced through them to make sure I knew how to get there, how to get back, approximately how much it would cost, and all the major sites I would want to visit once I was there. Ultimately, however, I think I knew in the back of my mind that I would want to cover the whole thing, if I could. Come the morning, as usual, I had a brief meeting with Philip, this time to call the bus company in Rome and confirm our tour for tomorrow. After the incident at the King's Palace in Morocco, Philip retains a certain amount of horror about people we need failing to show up at the appointed place and time.
ASIDE! The incident at the King's Palace in Morocco occurred about three years ago, during my first cruise with Theatre at Sea, when Jess was group director and I was office support. Specifically, on that particular cruise we were meant to have a tour of the King's Palace in Rabat - Philip had e-mailed a tour operator at the King's Palace for just this purpose, but didn't make final confirmation by phone. Well, when the ship docked in Casablanca, all 120 of our passengers boarded the four tour buses we'd chartered. They sat the three hours it took to get to Rabat, walked up to the King's palace...and nothing. No tour operator. No one to meet them. In Ron's words:
"There were only these two female tour attendants who were dressed like, I kid you not, a pair of prostitutes, and they had no idea who we were. Philip took one look at them and his jaw just dropped. He was completely flabbergasted. He turned to me and said, 'Well...we've hit rock bottom.'"
Having no idea where the tour conductor was or why they were in this situation, Ron took Philip aside and said, "Philip, our people are getting restless. You need to do something."
Philip's response, in typical Philip fashion: "Well, we could drive back to Casablanca and do some shopping, I suppose."
To which Ron replied, "Philip, these people have just sat three hours for a tour of the palace. We cannot just drive them back to Casablanca and go shopping. Now you get those two hookers over there and you pay to have them show us something, anything - the King's bathroom, if you have to - but these people need to see at least SOMETHING while they're here."
The day after, when I asked Jess via e-mail how things were going, she merely replied, "Don't ask about Morocco." Later, I received an e-mail from the central office explaining matters - apparently, the tour operator we had been in contact with misread our e-mail to him and thought he was to meet us at the pier in Casablanca. While our group was waiting for him at the King's Palace, he was waiting for us at the docks.
To this day, the Morocco Incident continues to live in infamy.
So, anyway, back to the main story - we confirmed with Rome about our tour tomorrow, so I don't anticipate having to rely on tour prostitutes showing us anyone's bathroom. I decided at this point that I was going to head ashore, since it was drawing on eleven and I knew it would take at least an hour each way to get to Pompeii by train. Somewhere in the back of my head I thought, "You know, you probably ought to get the info about Rome out to everybody." However, the sun was already high in the sky and the notion of folding and addressing three dozen letters struck me as a particularly onerous task. It would take a good hour at least, maybe two, and that meant I wouldn't make it into Pompeii until well past two. So yeah, I decided I'd get to the mailing when I got back - surely I'd be back by six at the latest, right? How large could a set of ruins really be? Yeah. Uh huh. Brilliant, G.
Back in my stateroom, I changed into something casual-cool and by my estimate modestly Sicilian - a simple white shirt with sleeves rolled up, pale khakis, and my brown leather flip-flops. Tote bag in hand, outfitted with snacks and a large bottle of water, I strolled off the ship and took the tender into Sorrento.
There's not a great deal I can say about Sorrento itself - it's a pretty sort of town, and I bought a bottle of blueberry Powerade in my halting Italian, which turned out to be unnecessary since the clerk spoke English. My attempt to withdraw a little bit of money was also forestalled by a woman who either didn't know how to operate an ATM or was trying to hack into the bank using her cell phone. I dunno - she was standing there for a good ten minutes with no cash to show for her troubles and a queue creeping some twenty-odd feet behind us. I for my part just gave up waiting (partially because I wasn't sure I wouldn't make an equally large fool of myself trying to operate an Italian ATM).
The train into Pompeii was breezy and quick, although inundated with a swarm of kids in the middle / high school age range. Considering that today is a weekday and I was riding the train around noon, I have no idea what they were all doing there. Don't kids go to school in Sicily? I eventually fished out my iPod and composed D&D encounters in my head while waiting for the Pompeii Scavi stop.
Now, on to Pompeii itself, since nobody really needs a recap of how I bought my tickets. My first impression of Pompeii was definitely one of age, that truly monumental sense of bygone eras pressing out of every cobblestone and brick. It's a feeling hard to describe - this strange mix of muted awe and wonder that slowly takes hold as you realize that you're walking on streets once bustling with people two thousand years ago.
The map of Pompeii the ticket office handed me broke the city down into major sites of interest, numbering them from 1 to 70. Being both neurotic and obsessive-compulsive, I decided that if I was to see everything in this amazing place, the most logical progression was to simply follow the numbers. By pure happenstance, I ran into Michael and his boyfriend, Darren, around number 5. They had already been in the city for quite some time and had wandered around rather haphazardly. They were looking for the brothel before leaving the city, as they wanted to drop by Capri before the ship left in the evening, but evidently I skimmed past that part while reading my guide books because I had no idea what they were talking about. Before we parted ways, however, they warned me that Pompeii was big. Really big. Big enough that I could easily spend the entire day there and not see everything. I accepted this bit of advice with grace, but inside I scoffed a bit - judging from what I'd already seen and based upon the scale of the map, I was sure I could see the entirety of the city. I mean, I'm young and I walk like a New Yorker. How bad could it be?
Ah, the springtime Pride of youth, once again raped in the face by the burly manhood of Experience.
Suffice it to say, two hours later I was only halfway through the 20's, feeling a bit light-headed with the pounding I was getting from the sun, and cursing the ancient Pompeiians for not discovering how to pave their streets with asphalt. Already I had slipped, tripped, or stumbled a good dozen-odd times on the cobblestones, and I was getting sincerely afraid that my sandal straps would give before I got home, forcing me to limp barefooted through the rest of the ruins. On the bright side, however, I was snapping pictures like a madman. My family back home will be terribly gratified to know that I've finally satisfied that Asian stereotype, and that while I was at it I riced out a Toyota Camry and opened a dry-cleaner just outside Pompeii city limits.
I could probably write a book about everything I saw in Pompeii, but rather than bore you with the details I'm going to focus on just three things that seemed particularly significant to me while I was there. The first are the plaster casts of the victims, which are distributed in three locations around the city. Although they're all kept under sealed glass, visitors are allowed to examine them very closely, and in so doing I found myself deeply unsettled. All of the casts show the victims in twisted, contorted positions. There's one of a man with his arms raised, trying to ward himself from the rain of burning ash, and even in the rough plaster the agony on his face is clearly recognizable. Another toward the southern end of the city reveals parents huddled over the body of their child in a futile effort to protect him. A third - one of the really famous ones - shows a dog curled in on itself, in that position dog owners would recognize as one of pain and fright. On more than one cast, the plaster has begun to peel away, revealing yellowed bone underneath and really driving home the realization that these were all people, once. People who died horribly, in terror, without understanding what was happening to them or why, as the skies turned black and belched fire onto their city. It's a sobering thought.
On a lighter note, the second item of particular interest I found was the Lupanar, the aforementioned brothel that Michael and Darren was trying to find. Of all the sites in Pompeii, this was the only one that had a line to get in! The inside of the Lupanar itself was rather spartan - the place consisted of maybe a half-dozen cubicle-sized rooms, each furnished with only a small stone bed maybe five feet long that looked vastly uncomfortable. The highlight of the place, however, were a series of frescoes - one above each cubicle - that depicted people having sex in positions ranging from rear penetration to spread-eagle for oral. It was hilarious! It was like you could go window shopping for suggestions while you were waiting for your...um...turn? Got bored of missionary? Here! Come into this room and try a slow fuck on your side! Of course, I took pictures of all the frescoes, although by this point I was getting a bit conscious of how many pictures I was taking. Considering that I really have no way of getting pictures off my camera on this ship, I'm basically limited to what my solitary 4 gig memory card could hold, and I've already clicked my way halfway through that. I'm going to be really, really annoyed if I run out of pictures halfway through Monte Carlo.
The third item of interest I found in the Villa of Mysteries, which is the home of a particularly wealthy patrician on the outskirts of Pompeii. Curiously, the path leading to this Villa led through a series of ancient graveyards and necropolises, which is pretty creepy when you think about it. The villa itself was very large and quite grand, and was one of the more intact structures in Pompeii. By virtue of this, in fact, one of the rooms in the villa had the most well-preserved frescoes in all of Pompeii, and they were beautiful. Their colors were saturated and rich, the images highly detailed. There were other buildings in various parts of Pompeii where you could see some partially-preserved wall decorations, and at least one house that retained a very well-kept image of Venus. At the Villa of Mysteries, however, you could really get a strong sense of what the city might have looked like, two thousand years ago. Based upon that glimpse, it must have been a stunning place.
In the end, Pompeii took me about six hours to traverse, and I only ended up managing sites 1 through 60 or so. I comfort myself with the notion that at least a few of those sites were just doors out of the city, but in truth I was so tired by the end of it I doubt I could have appreciated anything else. I also hadn't eaten in about eight hours, and given the amount of walking I had done the notion of cannibalism was getting more appealing by the minute. I ended up getting some carbonara from this little pizzeria just outside Pompeii, and I'm still feeling annoyed that I ate there. The place was clearly there to rip off tourists. Although the woman at the front counter assured me that everything was "made fresh!" I caught her pulling out a microwavable meal out of a freezer after I'd paid. The carbonara pretty much tasted like it too. It was also dripping with grease and had this unhealthy-looking bright yellow color generally reserved for cake and dandelions. It's particularly offensive when you think about the fact that Italy is so well known for its array of marvelous foods. I ate about half my carbonara before deciding that I could fish better food out of the Crystal Serenity's toilets.
I apologize if that's excessively gross to anyone here.
The train ride back to the ship was uneventful, but I didn't make it back to my stateroom until about 7:00 pm, and oh boy did my decision about Rome come back to haunt me. There were a good fourteen messages waiting for me (Oh yeah. I forgot to mention - I finally decided to give out my stateroom number, as I needed to know whether my tallies were correct as far as who was going on which shore excursion.) Naturally, all of them wanted to know the details about Rome - when we were leaving, where we were leaving from, when we were coming back, etc. There was also a message from Edna, indicating that Myrna was incredibly pissed off I hadn't gotten back to her with Rome details. Oops.
Well, I quickly sat down and rattled off the Rome newsletter, then jaunted downstairs to do some damage control in the dining room. I didn't quite get mobbed, but it felt a little like it with all the people calling my name from their tables. It was like a broken record - we're leaving tomorrow at nine am, down at reception on deck five. Yes, tomorrow at nine am, deck five. Reception on deck five, nine am. Myrna was indeed pissed ("I didn't have any messages about Rome. None, this entire day!") and I briefly entertained the notion of punching her in the face before fleeing in the opposite direction and diving off the ship. I settled for just reassuring her about Rome tomorrow and booking it out of there as soon as I was done.
I caught up with David in Silk Road, which was nice and reassuring. ("Well, I wasn't worried because it's not like we wouldn't see you at some point this evening, and I figured you'd definitely tell us before bed.") I ate a ton of sushi, which was fun and enlightening because the Silk Road sushi chefs all make the food right there in front of you. Now I know how rolls are made!
Rome is coming up tomorrow - the second of our Theatre at Sea shore excursions - and I do admit I'm getting a teeeeeeny bit anxious when I consider the possibility of there not being a bus waiting for us at the dock. I know we confirmed already, but I'm neurotic and obsessive, dammit! I like turning over these anxieties in my mind like a cow chewing a piece of cud.
At least we'll be docked in Rome. If we were going in by tender, I suspect more than one Theatre at Sea passenger will have gone overboard before the day's end.
No comments:
Post a Comment