Italy Day Four ((It's July 4th?))

Welcome to Naples. I woke up in the hotel room at 6:45AM this morning wondering if last night had actually happened. It was one of those surreal things that happen sometimes when you are traveling. I wondered where I was, and then the memories of last night came flooding through my head like an erupting volcano.

Speaking of volcanoes, that is why I woke up at 6:45AM. Michelle and I had to hail a taxi and get back to the ship before 8:15AM to make it in time for our SAS trip. We were going to hike Mount Vesuvius, which we thought was a dormant volcano. Apparently, it’s still very active. But. That’s another story. We arrived at the ship’s port in one piece, which was not guaranteed because drivers in Italy are insane. We had to wait for an entire hour for our ship to actually dock and get cleared for inspection by Port Authority. It was ridiculously hot for so early in the morning. I was sweating and I hadn’t even hiked yet. I was just standing there.

The bus ride to the volcano took about 45 minutes, and I stepped off of the bus hopeful. We weren’t in the city, and I could see trees (which were very much lacking in Venice). It was nice to be outside, in the country, going for a hike.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was not by any means prepared to hike this volcano. I am not really in shape. Okay, let’s be honest here… I hate to formally exercise. With a passion. I love to hike, but I get easily winded and I don’t care much for exercise that involves trying to keep up with people. This trip had about fifty SAS students all hiking with us up the side of the volcano. We weaved and slipped and tripped up to the top of the crater. Did I mention that the entire thing was covered in ash? Not black ash, but grey, rocky ash. I was wearing my Pumas that gave me no traction whatsoever, and I looked like I just learned how to walk trying to climb this massive hill. It was embarrassing.

We then proceeded to walk around the entire tip of the volcano, from one side of the crater/hole/thing to the other. I was very wrong in thinking that the top would be a smooth journey. Please. Is any hike ever easy?

My socks/shoes/ankles were black with ash. My legs were preparing themselves to become unhinged from my hips. My hair was wet and sticking to my face in a nasty puddle of sweat. My feet were cramping so bad that I had to literally talk myself through each following step. My fellow hikers were trudging up the steep, rock-ridden hills with ease, and I tried very hard to keep up at first. I really did. And then I noticed that most of the hikers were boys with calf muscles the size of Mount Vesuvius itself. They are the ones who work out on the ship every morning to heavy metal, who do pull-ups with one arm while drinking down raw eggs with the other arm. Who was I kidding? I was hiking a volcano with people who probably trained their whole lives to do something this incredible.
The views, however, were breathtaking. Awe-inspiring. Miraculous. The pictures I took at the top of the volcano don’t describe its beauty, its majesty. I took a deep breath and let it all soak in. On the way down the volcano, I was slipping and sliding all the way down, and I was terrified. I don’t do heights very well when I’m not restrained in some shape or form. I can do roller coasters and probably even skydiving, but practically falling down the side of the volcano found me holding onto a complete stranger, after explaining to the fifty people behind me why I was holding up the line. It was mortifying, really.

After we returned from the trip, Michelle and I hailed another taxi to get back to Jenna’s hotel. We had planned on going to Pompeii (the place where the one Mt. Vesuvius eruption took out the entire city and covered everything in black), so we had to meet her and figure out a way to this infamous city. A taxi pulled up beside us after we walked a ways from the port, and asked us if we needed a ride. We were absolutely exhausted, and jumped in. I should have known the whole thing was sketchy when I looked around for the money meter in the cab and did not find one.

He kept looking at us in the mirror, asking where we were from, asking our names (I told him mine was Stephanie), and he reached back to shake our hands, which he held for way too long. He said his name was Gino. I wanted to laugh and cry because of course his name would be Gino. I suddenly felt like I was in a mafia movie, the Godfather or something. Gino.

He pulled us up next to the hotel, and opened the back door for us. After proceeding to rip us off, and pulling a price out of thin air, he did not give us back the right amount of change and got this scary look on his face when I tried to argue with him. As I heaved my bag on my shoulder, I felt his hand come up and brush my jawbone. I pushed Michelle up the stairs and into the hotel faster than I have ever pushed anyone. The taxi drivers are disgusting and more untrustworthy in Naples than I ever could have thought possible.

After grabbing Jenna from the room, we walked to the train station only to find out that there were no more trains to Pompeii. We resorted to walking through Naples in the daylight, which was almost worse than walking around at night. I have never witnessed many creepy men blatantly eyeing us up in broad daylight. It was degrading. We walked into the nearest restaurant/cafeteria type place and proceeded to order food from a deli-type counter. The man who took our orders looked like he could have been my grandfather, if I were Italian, that is. I pointed to pasta with red sauce, which he put in tinfoil and gladly handed over to me.

When I realized I didn’t have a fork, he walked around to the counter, grabbed my hands and asked where I was from. I said America…I was too stunned that he was still holding my hands and speaking to me in Italian. Italians must not have an issue with personal space. My personal space was always, always being invaded in Naples. It was sickening. He touched my hair (which was mostly scrunched up underneath a baseball cap, because I did not need my blonde hair sticking out like a sore thumb), and handed me a fork from the counter. Walking quickly away, I took a bite of my pasta hungrily and realized that something was wrong.

The tortellini was chewy…and tasted a lot like seafood. I looked down into the container and saw a tentacle, an actual suction-cupped tentacle peeking out from the tinfoil. I yelped and spit out the not-pasta immediately. I felt sick.

A man came over to our table and said “Sexy ladies, Bon Appetit!”, and then I watched him move to a corner of the place with his cell phone. Jenna and Michelle refused to look up from the table, but I made sure he knew that I was aware that he was still grinning nastily at us. He held up his phone and took our picture. That’s when I jumped up from the table and told them we needed to leave. Now.
I was tired of being hawk-eyed by gross men. When we got back on the ship that night, I heard other people’s stories and some of them were way worse than ours. Some of them couldn’t even compare. But every girl that I talked to felt degraded in some form or another, just walking around the city. I think that if everyone is saying the same thing about Naples, about the people, that SAS should never take students back to that port again. I think a bunch of us are going to write letters explaining how we felt, and that if safety is an issue on this ship, the itinerary should be looked at for the next trip. It was just sickening.

And the thing is, it’s not like that in all of Europe. I did not have one problem in Venice, or too much of a problem in Spain…and I didn’t experience the degradation in Germany or Austria…it was specifically Naples. Happy Fourth of July…
A.