Med Trip - June 6

A fine, sunny day as we arrived in Naples at 7:30AM. After a wonderful creole omelette breakfast, we left the ship and had to be shuttled to a location a few minutes from the dock. From here we wandered through the streets of Naples looking for interesting buildings, parks, limoncello factories or anything nice. We of course were met with people pushing excursions to Pompeii. Italy also seems to have a lot of African men who seem to think that tourists flock to Italy to purchase cheap, hand-made African items. I never noticed Italians in South Africa pawning pizza cutters or limoncello. Of course, Italians don't use pizza cutters. They serve you pizza uncut and give you very dull knifes to attack it with. Like our experience everywhere, people at info centres, stores, etc. were mostly rude, abrupt and unfriendly. Naples was dirty, grungy and unattractive. We did find narrow little streets with shops and some old churches, but most buildings were not well kept and were layered in centuries of dust and pollution. Surprisingly, we did stumble across a small limoncello factory. We walked for a few hours and were quite done with it. Returning to the ship, we considered our visit successful in that we all returned alive without anyone being mugged or otherwise accosted by the mafia. We spent the afternoon relaxing on the ship rather than returning to land. We did score for dinner though. We had booked a table at the rear window of the dining room and managed to reserve it for the balance of the trip. Soon after leaving Naples at 6PM, at the end of dinner, we did see a pod of dolphins behind the ship. In the evening we attended the comedy show, which wad good, participated in 50's music trivial and ended the evening listening to Maegan and Diego, the piano players doing 70's tunes at 10:45PM. We also learned that we had to set our watches an hour ahead overnight. Good thing the next day was a sea day.

Sent from my iPad