Tuesday, May 15, 2001

2001/05/15

When we went to pay for the hostel in Naples this morning, it was supposed to be 30,000 lira a night, per person, about $21. They ended up only charging us 25,000 lira ($18). Pleasant surprise.

Anyway, I've done it. I'm all red and quite sore, finally! Being in the sun all day on Capri, combined with the sun on previous days has finally burned me. Woohoo!

We got up about 8:00 and had breakfast and went to the train station, via subway. Got on a 9:50 train to Milan. It stops in Rome, so we got off there.

We kinda got took at the train station in Naples. We were walking to the first class cars, and some guy in a conductors type uniform asked us, "First class?", we said yes, and he started running, indicating for us to follow. We thought he was a conductor trying to get the train loaded. He took us to the first class cars, and herded us into one of the compartments. Then he wanted a tip for his services. We tried giving him our change, but he wanted 10,000 lira (about $7.00CDN) from each of us. Stupid us forked it over. Beware of scam artists in Europe!!! Ryan was whining about it for half an hour afterwards.

Arrived in Rome about noon about noon. When we got off, a guy approached us and askied us if we had a place to stay. We didn't, so he asked us our price range, then he took us to a hotel a couple of blocks away. The hotel was clean, and the room is 40,000 lira, less than $30CDN each, so we took it. It also saved us the hassle of finding a place to stay, seeing as how the main HI hostel was full.

This guy represents about 30 hotels, from 1 star to 5 star hotels. Kind of a good idea to drum up business for the hotels, but kinda a nuisance if you don't want to deal with them.

We walked to the Hard Rock Cafe, and had lunch/supper, then bought souvenirs there, and came back to the hotel.

Every night in Rome, they have an English-only pub crawl. I remember Darryn Monaghan and his wife telling us about the pub crawl when they came to Rome last year, and we had a few other people mention it to us in our travels throughout Europe. They meet at the Collisseum at 8:00, then take you to a bar where you can drink all the beer you want for an hour, then you take a bus to a bunch of bars. You get a free shot at each bar. At the end of the night, you get a pub crawl t-shirt, it lists all the bars visited on the back of the t-shirt. We are going to do the pub crawl tonight.

So much for Ryan not drinking for the rest of the trip!! By the way, Ryan's gonna be in for a shock when he sees the picture we took of him after he crashed on his bed after the beer house in Munich. (Kara, if you're reading this, don't say anything to Ryan about this on the phone or after he gets back, until he sees the picture himself!) He has no idea this picture exists!!!! Is it every funny, though! That makes two compromising pictures of Ryan we have (the other one being him trying to break the lock on his locker at the hostel in London, in his underwear).

I will report on the pub crawl in the next journal.

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