This past Saturday, my six friends and I went to Napoli, Italy and Pompeii, Italy. We started off our journey at 5:00 in the morning with a cab ride to the train station. We boarded our train for Napoli at 6:30 and we arrived by 8:30. After that, we had to navigate around a crowded and foreign train station. We found the ticket station or biglietteria where we bought $5 round trip bus tickets to Pompeii. We arrived to Pompeii by 9:30 and stood in line to pay for more tickets to explore the ancient ruins. The town of Pompeii is surrounded by mountains, meaning a high chance of earthquakes. In 63 AD, an earthquake shook the town of Pompeii and the civilians spent years rebuilding. Disaster hit again in 74 AD, even one of the volcanos erupted and covered the entire city with ash and molten lava. The city was found by explorers years later. Since then, archeologists have preserved the remains of the city, allowing tourists to wander through the endless mazes of Pompeii. All seven of us were in complete shock. The rocks that remain hold so much history. Even some of the artwork and scriptures on the walls are still in tact. A lot of the colors are burnt oranges and reds. One of the main colors is called "Pompeii Red." After taking endless photos of the buildings and breathtaking mountains, we found the amphitheaters. Although some of the stone is remodeled, both of the amphitheaters are massive and quite cool. Lastly, we found the casts of the bodies that were found and preserved. Although this is extremely sad, I think it was one of the best parts of Pompeii.
After learning about the city more, we decided it was time to leave. With our bus tickets in hand, we took off for a short walk to the little bus station down the road. As we were walking, we were called "Charlie's Angels" by the street vendors. Once we got back to the Napoli train station, we decided to explore Napoli more. We found another biglietteria and paid exactly 2 euro to go to the Napoli museum and back. The museum was so much more than I expected. We saw sculptures of Greek Gods, beautiful ceiling murals, and so much more. There was even a room full of erotic paintings. It took us a few minutes to realize the paintings were supposed to be sexual. This collection of paintings was banned for the public for hundreds of years. Over the past few years, the museum has allowed people over 18 to see these explicit paintings from Pompeii. It's kind of interesting I guess, if you can get past all the obnoxiously large genitalia. We spent a few hours in the museum, carefully looking at the works of art in each room and taking pictures of our favorite pieces. At some point, all of us hit a wall and could no longer bare the thought of walking anymore. We searched and searched for a restaurant for dinner, but couldn't find anything. So we decided to take the metro from the museum to the train station and find a restaurant there. We ended up going to a sandwich shop and I ordered a pizzetta con prosciutto e mozzarella; it's basically a ham and cheese sandwich, but it's pizza dough instead of normal bread. It was huge and I finished the entire thing on my own. After all, we had walked over 20,000 steps, so I think I deserved it. Then we got McFlurries from the Italian McDonald's in the train station. The flavors for the McFlurries are completely different from America! I got one with Baci which is a hazelnut chocolate fudge sauce. YUM! After filling our stomachs, we felt a little bit less exhausted. But that didn't stop of from being obnoxious while we were waiting to board our train. 
Out of nowhere, some 80 year old Frenchmen approached us and asked if we were students. This adorable man tried his best to have a conversation with us as we spoke bit of English/Italian/French. In the end, we learned that he was a chemical engineer from France. Because of the language barrier, he took out a pen and piece of paper and started writing out math and chemistry equations to see if we could get the answers. He started with things like H20 and CO2 and then he wrote harder things like log(x) and some other equations only Kelsey could understand. He was so interested in our studies and I even spoke a couple sentences of Italian to him. I'm not sure if he understood what I was staying, but he nodded like he did! After he said  "bye bye" we joked that he was a ghost because he came out of nowhere and disappeared so quickly! By the way, his name is Victor. After Victor left, we had another period of slap happiness. There was an adorable and very animated boy sitting in the booth next to us. He ended up playing with his sword, pretending to fight with us while we were sitting at our table. Before I knew it, our train had arrived and we were off to Rome in no time. This was an amazing trip that I will remember for the rest of my life. I hope you enjoy these photos that I took. 

Here are my pictures from Pompeii--------------------------------