Euro Epic: Day 6: Smelling blue

May 26th-

Another early day. We ate breakfast, jumped on the bus and headed to Pompeii!

Pompeii was not ruins in the way Rome was, bled out with eons of people streaming through it. It's an active site (located, as I've said, under an active volcano), easy to imagine the city's life when the grooves from chariot wheels tripped me in the streets. Life was stripped from there so fast its frozen face is still very evident; it's a little eerie.

Stepping on the stepping stones

I believe this is the temple of Jupiter, with Mt. Vesuvius in the back.

Mt. Vesuvius

A street in Pompeii

A man who curled up and died.

Artifacts
(it's one of my favorite words.)

Ancient Lego.

Pompeii from a distance

Group shot!

After Pompeii, it's going to be a very long bus ride to our overnight ferry.

We made a photo stop along the way

Mom (isn't she handsome?)

Unless I want to complain, dinner on this ferry isn't much to write about.

Our overnight ferry

But standing on the deck of the boat, the view is beautiful. I remember how I read in books that the sky will meet the water or the water turns to sky. The horizon has disappeared. I could see a ship in the distance and it didn't look like it was on sky or water. Someone took blue tissue paper and stuck a sticker of a boat many miles away.

There is so much blue here, in a thousand different consistencies. Sometimes it's so thick in the air I can pinch it between my fingers, taste it in my mouth. It seems like it would get boring, having so much of one color around, but then again, there is so much of so much of it; such a vast variety of one color, it's like becoming reacquainted with a familiar friend, or reading a brand new page in a book I've read a thousand times.

Right now blue smells like tanker oil and burned rolls. They way dinner was on this boat, they probably burned the rolls cooking them in the tanker oil.

You know you're in Italy when:

That night on the ferry, we're all goofing off up on the deck, and I see a man walking towards us from the other end of the boat.

I promise you, I squinted, I cocked my head, I shook myself and looked again. This guy was wearing nylons. He definitely had a glossy sheen coating his lower limbs. He was strutting a little as well. I was mesmerized/ disgusted though, the way the light played over his tights. When he walked past us, I realized I was dead wrong: he was cloaked in leg hair. All that glisten and shine was his hair follicles. I've never seen so many on two legs. I'm sure the sheer weight of his hair would have sunk a less stable craft.