Our World Travels...

Venice was beautiful, but also at times we found could be a bit overwhelming. We took a night train from Naples, two hours south of Rome, all the way up to Venice, which is in the northeast of Italy. It was a long trip, from 8PM to 5:30 AM. We had reserved couchettes, or fold down beds, so that we could sleep on the train. Despite what we had thought, it was pretty hard to sleep on the train. It had frequent stops, swayed, and was louder than expected. Since we were in a four bed compartment, we were also joined at about 12:30 AM by a confused Italian girl. Getting to Venice at 5:30 AM with not to much sleep, we struggled a bit to find the correct water bus to our hotel. One we arrived, after climbing the 3 flights of stairs to reception, we were graciously allowed us to drop our things off for the day, since check in wasn't until the afternoon. They also allowed us to freshen up, since we had been on the go since leaving ome the day before. Our first impression of Venice was that

Pompeii was an interesting sight, as was Naples. We took a train from Rome into Naples, then caught a local train out to the site. Naples is notorious for being crime ridden, and we certainly got our fair share of shifty eyes and weird looks. We were only there for about 30 minutes at that! From the train we saw that EVERYthing was covered in grafitti. They need a couple of hundred painters to go to work in that city... Pompeii was a good place to go see though. The city is much, much larger than we had anticipated. Its pretty huge, and took us most of the day to walk down and back one major street. There are lots of houses to explore, as well as theaters, cafes, bakeries, and even an amphitheater for gladiatorial games, kind of like the Colosseum, but only held 20,000 people, not 50,000. Many of the houses were in superb shape, with paint and frescoes still on the walls, along with marble floors and fountains, while others were pretty devastated. We also saw one or two of those plaste