Napoli part deux

So yeah, terrifying first night, but our hostel was reassuringly safe. Two floors up, big thick doors etc. The first night I managed to finally come down with the cold that had been threatening to arrive for a week, and had a really bad night's sleep, tossing and turning and getting up to blow my nose super loud in the shared bathroom (sorry people next door!)...

In the morning we were woken fairly early by loud yells, bangs, screeches and general kafuffle down on the street, where it appeared the cars had been booted off the road and it turned into a big market by day. And we're not talking awesome Borough market style sadly, it was all crappy phones and clothes and knock off handbags. It all cleared out by about dinner time but boy howdy do they get up early to hock their wares!

Anyways, we got up, got our stuff sorted and ventured out. Spent the day wandering around town really, found a big castle and went in, wandered through 'old town' – Spaccanapoli – and then meandered back via winding streets and oddly a large number of shops selling Bambino goods. Baby gear. Who would raise children there, I ask you!

On the meander back we caught a cable car up the hill and went to a monastery that looks out over all of Napoli. Wandered through the museum and looked out across town. It was a lovely view but a bit cloudy, so we couldn't see out to Mt Vesuvius or to Capri. Caught a different cable car down the hill and headed back to the hostel.

In the short time we were back at the hostel before dinner, one of the staff managed to communicate to me that my shoulder bag was not so good, as it could be stolen reasonably easily. I demonstrated that I wore it over both shoulders and that I held onto it at all time, but he responded with 'ciao ciao italiano ciao yank yank, ciao ciao fall, ciao head injury' along with complete actions to show just how someone could really really try to steal it... I did not use the bag again!

Dinner was a lovely affair, we went to a pasta place in Piazza Garibaldi (opposite side of the square to where the scary phone seller was) and had prosciutto and mozzarella for starters, pasta for main (i love linguine bella donna!) and then this stuff called Babba for dessert with some panna cotta. Babba is AWESOME. It's like, a sponge cake thing, but drenched in syrup or something, it was so good. Recommended to us by our lovely waiter who spoke pretty good English and encouraged us to get a small bottle of wine each, which we both were surprised at but glad to find only cost about 2 euros each. Yum yum house wine! Headed home reasonably early – for one we were tired after walking around all day and for another, Napoli after dark is not cool.

Thursday led us out to Pompeii, which was so so cool! I hadn't realised it, but it's actually pretty much the whole city that has been excavated, not just a few buildings or a museum. We got there about 12ish and after a quickly inhaled margherita, we traipsed all over the place. It is awesome. So many houses and streets and buildings, random graffiti carved into walls, and awesome porno paintings on the walls of some houses (dirty little pompeiins :) ). Saw the plaster casts of people caught in the eruption, very dramatic. We took oodles of photos which will eventually make it online.

Headed back to the same pasta place again for dinner, this time a little too early for the lovely waiter to have turned on his charm, but the food was just as good. Had babba again because hey, it was delicious.

We then had one more day and decided to go to Capri...