Day 20...Pompeii or Pompei? Depends on what language you speak!

Day 20, July 4th: 

Guess what?  The ship is setting off fireworks from the Deck tonight!  If you believe that then let me know and I will tell you another one.  It would be amazing though…  We actually get to have a BBQ on for dinner tomorrow night!  It should be fun! 

Today we went to explore Pompeii (aka Pompei in Italian).  We began the day at 08:00by running up to Deck 5 to eat some breakfast before heading out for our excursion.  Danielle and I ended up leaving the ship around 09:00 to head to the train station for our 40-minute train ride.  The train tickets were only 3.80 euros for a roundtrip ticket.  That was super cheap!  I was excited.  Tickets to enter Pompeii were pretty reasonable too, 11 euros.  They also gave us a wonderful map and a guidebook with a full page of history and information about each site for free.  As many of you already know, Pompeii was established around the 6th or 7th century B.C.  Mount Vesuvius is an active volcano located about 30-40 miles away from Pompeii and it erupted on August 24th of 79 A.D.   The volcanic ash set upon the city of Pompeii and buried it along with everyone in it.  In 1748, King of Naples Charles III of Bourbon began to excavate the property and restore the ancient city.  We ended up walking around Pompeii from 10:15 to 15:30.  We ate lunch on the site and I had a salami sandwich with mozzarella and basil.  After we explored all of the ruins, including the amphitheater, various houses, the forum and the sheds containing many of the pieces they have found on the site including humans and animals mummified by the volcanic ash. After we were exhausted from the heat and sun, we departed the site towards our train station.  Along the way, we had to do what we do best: eat gelato.  I had blackberry and lemon this time…OMG!!!!!!  Delicious!  Are you guys beginning to see a pattern here because I do…all of the gelato is super yummy (and much cheaper than we pay for ice cream in the US of A)!  The store we went to had some awesome looking pastries too, but I didn’t get any.  I wish I did now because they looked so good.  We then walked to the train station and returned back to the ship.  We ended the day pretty early and got a good night sleep.  We were pretty tired after walking around in the heat all day!