Pizza Place!

I left Rome and arrived in Napoli early in the afternoon. My first impression: SHIT. HOLE. It was by FAR the most disgusting city I had ever seen. Trash and trashy people were everyhwere. The metro was hardly working (because nobody ever paid, I later discovered). The buildings looked like they were falling apart. I was honestly a bit afraid of catching something. Even walking to my hostel in the middle of the afternoon was a bit nerve wracking. Every third person was a shady character.

When I arrived at the hostel, two Aussie guys were cooking pasta and invited me to eat, so I tossed my bags on the bed and ended up spending the afternoon drinking with them and a Mexican girl. My first night in Napoli I had decided I MUST have pizza, so the four of us went out for what has been the cheapest and by far the best pizza I have ever eaten. Three euros for a hand tossed, flame cooked pie. Pizza back home will never compete. We finished up, bought some beers and wasted away the night in a plaza until two in the morning.

My first full day in Napoli wasn't really spent in Napoli. The Aussies, a French girl and I went to Pompei. The ruins of Pompei are a fascinating site, but I'm glad I went with a crowd. I think if I were to have been by myself, I would've been bored in a couple hours. Thankfully, we made the best of the day wandering the entire city and poking fun at the cheesy audio guide. That night, we went out for pizza and beer AGAIN. Unfortunatley, Michele's, the most famous pizza place in all of Napoli, was closed. So we wandered the streets of downtown until we found the next open restaruant. Just like the last time, the pizza was fantastic. And just as cheap. I turned in early that night so I could meet some friends from Rome who were coming down to Napoli to...eat pizza!

I got up early on day two and met my friends at the rail station. Since they were only there for a short while, we walked about while I told them about the city for a bit before we grabbed lunch. The pizza was still great. It wasn't going to get old. My friends left back to Rome and I spent the remainder of the day wandering downtown Napoli before heading back to the hostel for a night of word games with the group from the day before. At about midnight that night, the hostel common room closed so a large group of us went out. We spent an hour in a plaza, another hour talking to an Italian man who was running a beer stand in the middle of the night and a third hour sitting at a metro stop, where we were climbing the tower in the middle of the plaza. Well, we were until one of the guys sliced his hand open. He had to go to the hospital the next day!

The last day in Napoli I went out with a couple Americans to the port. We started off the morning by working our way up the highest point in town to have an overlook then continued down seaside. We paid two euros to see the the last painting Carvaggio ever painted and had one more great pizza, sadly, my last from Naples. It was a very slow day. When we arrived back at the hostel, I and a couple others cooked some pasta for dinner before I took the train to my final Italian stop: Venice, again!