And I Think About Pompeii

Today did not turn out as expected, but in the end – it wound up being a decent day considering the considering the circumstances.

My alarm woke me up at 6:00, and by 6:30 Sarah, Ali, Molly, and I were all out the door. The apartment building was still pitch black (I managed to slip down the last few stairs as a result of that), and outside you could still perfectly trace the outline of the sliver moon with your pinkie finger. Oh yes, the 4 of us were heading up to AUR so that we could catch the bus to head to Pompeii for the day.

Now, for those of you who don’t know Pompeii used to be a commercial port with a population of about 20,000. In 79 A.D. Mt. Vesuvius erupted and covered the city with about 30 feet of lava and ash. The entire city was preserved under all the muck, so this is the place to go to see what Roman life was during this time period.

But, surprise! We didn’t ever make it to Pompeii! The bus pulled away from school at 7:30AM. The ride was supposed to take about 4 hours, and we were going to have a break at a rest stop about half way through it. Great idea in theory, but alas, not all things can be planned for. When we stopped, our bus drivers received word that a truck had jack-knifed on the highway, and as a result it was shut down. The back roads that we would have had to take would have been quite difficult for the bus drivers, and it probably would have taken upwards of another 5 hours. So, there was no way that we were getting to Pompeii anytime soon. On to plan B (or maybe it was plan C, I am unsure…)

The first stop was an outlet center called The Fashion District. It wasn’t a bad way to spend 2 hours, but it wasn’t at all what I expected. When someone says outlets in Italy – I think of the big name outlets (i.e. Prada, Fendi, etc) that people talk about when they come back to the states. Nope, this place was nothing like that. It was much more like the outlets that people tend to have about an hour away from their major cities. It was a good experience, but I of course walked away with nothing. There was nothing that caught my eye, and things were overall still kind of expensive. Probably the most exciting thing that happened during those two hours was I got to pet an ELEPHANT! There was an elephant that was just kind of chillin’ next to the parking lot. It looked like people were setting up for a circus, but it was still really random.

Another 45 minutes on the bus brought us to one of the hilltop towns outside of Rome called Frescati. It is a cute little town that is well known for its villas, pork sandwiches, white wine, and cookies of three breasted women. Everything was quite wonderful, except for the cookies called the pupazze frascatane – even though they were really funny looking. They were so hard that they wouldn’t break without dropping them on the floor.

“The "pupazze frascatane", typical for their three breasts, they are simple flour, water and honey-based biscuits. The Frascati three-breasted puppet is an amusing iconographic reminiscence of the Goddess of Plenty, who had a third breast producing wine instead of milk. The third breast derived from the ancient belief that children born in the Frascati area – notorious for its wine production – were also fed wine.”

When we returned back to Rome it was pouring as well as thundering and lightening. The busses were nice enough to drop us off by the tram so we wouldn’t have to walk to the 44 bus from school and then take it to the tram and then ride the tram. So, now Molly, Ali, Sarah, and I are back in the apartment in our pajamas and talking about making warm cookies. Which to me, sounds like the perfect end to this day.