Smile, Laugh, Travel

We had a booked walking tour of Naples at 1000.  However, and I’d really like to stress how dark our rooms were, we slept until 10am.  Drat.  Nevermind, we decided to freestyle our own walking tour.

Though you can’t tell from the face she’s making, Jane still loves a hotel breakfast.

We all laughed about the slogan for our hotel, “Smile, Laugh, Travel” so Joel and Jane acted it out for you here:

Our hotel gave us a free ornament of some type.  The explanation only said it was a symbolic of Naples, but didn’t clarify what it represented.  We guessed a horn.  The same symbol is on our furniture too.  As we started our walking tour, we discovered it was a pepper and they were everywhere.  Considered a good luck symbol on jewelry, we saw peppers all over, from street vendors to shops.

We stopped in the Duomo cathedral.

Saint Gennaro’s blood is apparently an ancient relic in this church.  The sign says it turns from viscous to liquid, a scientifically inexplicable mystery.  I leave it to the reader ot decide what they believe.

Wandering the streets, we encountered this Banksy that the restaurant had framed to protect.

And then this one in the wild. 

My jacket, but in an Italian clothing store.

The streets have no parking other than the sidewalks, but there are many tiny doors into plazas where cars are parked.

We countered this balcony street singer, which we think YZ would have loved. 

 The basket for tips is foreshadowing for our day.  Apparently tiny Naples street to-go restaurants have counters to only purchase food on the ground floor.  When your food is ready, the chef leans out of the 2nd story balcony and delivers it to you by basket.

We were stalled out by 10-person parade, featuring some loud drums so we just stopped to watch it go by.  I figured that as something I needed to document. The man came to me and aggressively demanded money, for what I don’t know, but I’m guessing his church.  Now I definitely do not like being aggressively panhandled, so I refused, much to his clear anger.  

A few minutes later, we encountered another parade with different folks.  Again, I was aggressively panhandled for filming it.  I guess this is the Catholic church’s way of taxing tourists.  If you look at all like you’re paying attention to the parade, you apparently owe them money?  I’m not sure, i wasn’t handed a brochure on arrival, but I presume so now.

By the third mini-parade, I figured out how to take an inconspic and avoid eye contact, just like the locals.  I didn’t get harassed.  For all the subsequent parades, and there were a lot, we didn’t document at all.  

People were out everywhere, mostly locals but also tourists, shopping and generally entertaining themselves.  There were scores of street markets and kids playing.  The boardwalk on the shore was wall to wall people.  The weather was just perfect, and the Sunday crowd seemed appropriate.

Lots of strange English on things, much like Asia.  Even stranger translations on menus required us to retranslate them from Italian.

Around every corner was a beautiful few, but in the old quarters they were filled with graffiti.

A very old mall, built to celebrate the unification of Italy into a country.

Mattress in the road.

A whole store where you buy the village and all of the village accessories.

Meat stores, both raw and cured, abound.

A note about driving.  I love to drive in foreign countries, and little makes me nervous… but THIS IS BANANAS.  Here is a typical parking situation.  Cars nearly touch.  Anything bigger than a smart car would be nearly impossible to drive here.  Most streets are sized for a motorcycle only and even turning a car around is impossible.  The larger boulevards don’t have lanes so much as they have a spaghetti bowl of cars in every direction.  Hills and blind curves add further challenge, as do motorcycles speeding in both directions on one-way streets.  Children without helmets ride motorcycles here in parent laps, enhancing one’s fear of collision.  Never would I ever drive here.  Never ever.

A note about gluten.  Nearly everything has gluten here.  We had to go out of our way to find a place that didn’t.  Joel found a restaurant that catetered to people with gluten allergies and it was fabulous.  A note about pizza.  Restaurants either serve pizza or pasta.  Restaurants that serve both are crappy and for tourists.  This gluten free restaurant had a sign out front that said, “NO PIZZA”, just in case you were wondering.

This is cheese fried in a cornmeal breading with balsamic roasted onions on top. Even better than it sounds. 

This meal was truly wonderful. We were very impressed with the sauce, which isn’t like anything we’d had at home or in Rome before.  Jane’s came out quite hot, but even her gluten free pasta was superior.

After lunch, we went on an e-bike tour.  Naples is highly 3-dimensional, and a traditional bike tour would have been an athletic feat.  However, Naples also has some of the worst roads I’ve ever seen.  Fat tire bikes were needed to navigate.

Our tour guide Giuseppe is pictured below.  He kept telling us that we shouldn’t worry about anything, as we were navigating traffic circles that were bananas and back streets packed with folks.  He would yell at them and part the sidewalk like the Red Sea, and we’d squeeze in behind him.  He biked like he owned the place.

The Amalfi coast behind us.

After a few more hours spent roaming and one more meal, we called it quits for the day.  Jane nearly fell asleep (or maybe did once or twice) at our table waiting for food.  We’re off to bed now for an earlier start tomorrow.

Sneak preview of tomorrow:  Mount Vesuvius from Naples, with Pompeii on the bottom of the right hand slope.