rosana, prostitutes and prune in pompeii

This weekend I went on another school trip! We traveled about 8 hours to southern Italy to the legendary ancient city of Pompeii and then to the Amalfi coast to the gorgeous towns of Veco Equense and Sorrento. It was fabulous! Nowadays these weekend trips are what I LIVE for.

Pompeii, for those that don't remember, is a city that was buried in 20 feet of ashes after the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius about 200 years ago. Almost everything that you see in my pictures was excavated from the ashes when the city was unintentionally rediscovered during the contruction of a road. I have to admit, I expected the ruins to be a lot more dramatic... I grew up seeing pictures of people frozen in ash running from the volcano when I learned about Pompeii! But a lot of the mummified bodies have been moved to Naples where there is a huge museum about Pompeii. Nevertheless, it was really cool to be in such a historic place. The details that were preserved underneath the ash are amazing... and you can really picture what life was like in this city.

We had an awesome tour guide named Rosana... this lady was soooo funny. First of all, she was so expressive with her hands and her body that for a second I thought she might have had a couple drinks before she started the tour. But then we just realized that was HER! haha. She had the illest accent and I knew I wouldn't be able to describe it to anybody to give the full effect so I recorded her! She did a great job both giving us the history of the city and entertaining us with her dirty little jokes.

One interesting thing about Pompeii is that they had a booming prostitution business. They had their very own red light district where women would have their own "working rooms". There was also like a "store" on the main road of the red light district where the men could go and pick what exactly they wanted from a menu! The "menu" was painted frescoes within this little building that had small rooms to wash up in before your services were provided. Rosana told us that this area was extremely popular... wealthy men would come here 2 or 3 times a DAY! lol Check out these pictures and see if you can figure out what this menu has to offer.... Click the pictures to see them full sized!

There were penises carved in the stone of the street where all this went down. These Pompeii folks were serious about their trickin!! lol

serious!!

And of course, we took some photos of ourselves and not just the scenery...

willy underneath some columns that reminded me of the old cingular "raising the bar" ads..
mckenzie and me being rockstars... this was my favorite photo of the day!

my roommate Becca being cute...
peter thinking.... Davvero???

more pictures of the ruins....
imagine how long it must have taken for them to dig all this out of 20 feet of ash!!

the perimeter of the city, temple of Isis and an altar for sacrifices to Isis

inside a bath house and another mummified body

the coliseum of Pompeii... Rosana told us that Pink Floyd performed here in the 70s... I wish I was there!

the central forum of the city and Mount Vesuvius in the background

I took a ton of pictures but these were my favorites! I may post more on facebook later but that's all for now... hope you enjoyed. Photos from Veco Equense and Sorrento coming up next. Ciao! :)