(no subject)
I forget that the significant portion of people on my flist actually don't care about my vacation posts.
Our last full day in southern Italia was spent wandering around the streets of Pompeii. Pompeii was extremely hot, dry and dusty. I did a bit more work on my sunburn as we wandered around the ruins of houses and ampitheaters. Perhaps we should've gotten a guide or map or something. Probably the creepiest thing I saw was the plaster casts they made of the people that got buried (and suffocated!) in the volcanic ash. Apparently the ash hardened this way and the bodies decomposed within, leaving imprint "molds" behind. Archeologists saw fit to pour plaster into these molds, making a fairly accurate reproduction of these people. You could see clothing, and in some cases, saddened or frightful expressions.
The day we left we decided to mail things back to the US. This day competes with the day before yesterday's mild bout of food poisoning for Worst Day of the Trip. Kathy and I split up in the morning to buy bus tickets for the airport and mail stuff, respectively. I got to the post office bright and early. I walked up to the desk (there was no line) and was told to take a number. When I did, it was clear (despite there being no one in line) that they wouldn't get to me for a long time. So I went up to the desk again, and was told to talk to someone else. I waited while this person sat and did stuff (for quite some time). Then I was told to go to the packing office, where I was told that they didn't have a box of the appropriate size to ship the stuff I was looking to ship. They told me to go find one on my own and pointed me to a shop down the street. What the fuck kind of post office doesn't have BOXES? So I walked down the street a couple blocks to the store they pointed out. This store didn't have boxes either. They sent me to Mailboxes, Etc. and fuck knows where that store was, it wasn't a couple more blocks down the road and I sure as hell wasn't carrying this shit another mile. So I gave up and walked back, in failure, to the hotel room. We ended up carrying the shit to Napoli Aeroporte.
There was another post office there. I waited another hour in line while the clerk argued with some old lady in front of me about fuck only knows what. I got sent through that line several times, filling out various forms. I was already pretty pissed when I was done and the price ($150 or so US) did not make me much happier. Hopefully sending back "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" was worth the cost in shipping. Better yet, since it's the Italian Post, we paid that delicious money not for shipping, but for the right to GAMBLE on our package arriving home. (The house tends to win there, too.)
It was about 1:30pm by this point and I was pretty fucking sick of waiting in lines. This, naturally, made it a GREAT day to GO TO THE FUCKING AIRPORT. Better yet, it was the most disorganized airport I've seen in MY LIFE. Worse than Mumbai Chittrapati Shivaji. The security line wasn't so much a line as a MOB. Same with the mosh pit of a line waiting to board. Better yet, we were told we were in the "D" boarding class, so we had to wait in the boarding mosh pit motherfucking TWICE.
Thankfully the day had a happy ending, as the flight was only delayed by an hour and a half. Whew! Thankfully the train ride to the hostel wasn't too bad. Our room clearly hadn't been aired out in a while. One day we were there the sink backed up and some pretty hideous stuff came out of it. The bed was saggy and the springs poked up through. Thankfully the rest of Paris was a tad nicer.
Our last full day in southern Italia was spent wandering around the streets of Pompeii. Pompeii was extremely hot, dry and dusty. I did a bit more work on my sunburn as we wandered around the ruins of houses and ampitheaters. Perhaps we should've gotten a guide or map or something. Probably the creepiest thing I saw was the plaster casts they made of the people that got buried (and suffocated!) in the volcanic ash. Apparently the ash hardened this way and the bodies decomposed within, leaving imprint "molds" behind. Archeologists saw fit to pour plaster into these molds, making a fairly accurate reproduction of these people. You could see clothing, and in some cases, saddened or frightful expressions.
The day we left we decided to mail things back to the US. This day competes with the day before yesterday's mild bout of food poisoning for Worst Day of the Trip. Kathy and I split up in the morning to buy bus tickets for the airport and mail stuff, respectively. I got to the post office bright and early. I walked up to the desk (there was no line) and was told to take a number. When I did, it was clear (despite there being no one in line) that they wouldn't get to me for a long time. So I went up to the desk again, and was told to talk to someone else. I waited while this person sat and did stuff (for quite some time). Then I was told to go to the packing office, where I was told that they didn't have a box of the appropriate size to ship the stuff I was looking to ship. They told me to go find one on my own and pointed me to a shop down the street. What the fuck kind of post office doesn't have BOXES? So I walked down the street a couple blocks to the store they pointed out. This store didn't have boxes either. They sent me to Mailboxes, Etc. and fuck knows where that store was, it wasn't a couple more blocks down the road and I sure as hell wasn't carrying this shit another mile. So I gave up and walked back, in failure, to the hotel room. We ended up carrying the shit to Napoli Aeroporte.
There was another post office there. I waited another hour in line while the clerk argued with some old lady in front of me about fuck only knows what. I got sent through that line several times, filling out various forms. I was already pretty pissed when I was done and the price ($150 or so US) did not make me much happier. Hopefully sending back "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" was worth the cost in shipping. Better yet, since it's the Italian Post, we paid that delicious money not for shipping, but for the right to GAMBLE on our package arriving home. (The house tends to win there, too.)
It was about 1:30pm by this point and I was pretty fucking sick of waiting in lines. This, naturally, made it a GREAT day to GO TO THE FUCKING AIRPORT. Better yet, it was the most disorganized airport I've seen in MY LIFE. Worse than Mumbai Chittrapati Shivaji. The security line wasn't so much a line as a MOB. Same with the mosh pit of a line waiting to board. Better yet, we were told we were in the "D" boarding class, so we had to wait in the boarding mosh pit motherfucking TWICE.
Thankfully the day had a happy ending, as the flight was only delayed by an hour and a half. Whew! Thankfully the train ride to the hostel wasn't too bad. Our room clearly hadn't been aired out in a while. One day we were there the sink backed up and some pretty hideous stuff came out of it. The bed was saggy and the springs poked up through. Thankfully the rest of Paris was a tad nicer.