Naples, Italy, Giorno 94. Two Views: Ocean and City, then the Ferry
In the morning, we realized that the hostel was located in the centre of the black market of the city, blankets and tables of discounted sunglasses and purses displayed right and left with aggressive voices accompanying them. They said, though we didn’t speak Italian, ‘buy, buy, buy from them all’. I felt disconcerted by this city and knew we had a day ahead of us to explore it. The hostel manager had significantly helped out, marking up a map precisely to give us cheap places to eat and places to see.
After a metro ride, we landed a few blocks from the water. As we walked up to the sight of the beautiful ocean, my stress over school work and long-distance relationship pain waved away as the glittering waters calmed my spirits instantly. I am on the other side of the world and my schoolwork exists wherever I am—but this doesn’t. The rocks line the shores, the waters crash with a soothing sound, boats docked and on the horizon dot the cerulean blue landscape, and my life is a part of this discourse.
I talked to Vito about hobbies and those subjects that we romanticize we want to do, like maybe architecture, when we’ve already set out on subjects we know and appreciate as our majors. There is that balance of reason and romance to determine the plausibility of a dream’s realization.
Soon we guys all stepped onto the shoreline rocks and jumped along the coast on our way to a castle in the distance. Eventually, we made it there, meandering around the castle and seeing sights from the top (the inside was a costly museum we had no interest in seeing). This is when I saw each new angle of the ocean as another sip of a restorative fruit drink, iced by a small breeze and sweetened by the lemon of the sunlight. The rocks in arbitrary yet solid formation lined the shore while boats left a white trail in the waves much like jets do in the sky. This was beautiful. |
| Latin engraving above, graffiti near the door... |
This ocean view was only one view of the city, and not even of the city. Lunch at the hands of an aggressive, money-pinching Italian waiter unsettled me, as did walking up an alley I think could be called ‘Deathtrap Alley’ for the sheer number of close calls we had in almost being hit by motorcyclists left and right. I had a slight wake-up call, though. Clothes folded and dried on apartment balconies made me realize the decline in affluence this city contains compared to our recent visited cities. The famous square of the city, another Vittorio Emanuele tribute, was marred by graffiti on the statues and walls behind the temple’s columns. We stopped for distasteful gelato (I declined, having had a berry fruit drink earlier), and Joe found it funny how Vito said the word ‘dirty’, which was said quite often about this city. I felt sick from my fruit drink later during our walk through Deathtrap Alley, and we all were weary from walking so much. Joe’s new phone app, a pedometer, read out our distance as of 5:15pm: 17,000 steps, or 13 k.
We finished the day by making a trek with all our bags (still regretting how much I’m carrying) to the port and stepping onto a Snav ferry for our 10-hour trip to Sicily.
There were 11 floors on this ferry, an inherent hierarchy from the ‘inferior cabins’ (as the direct translation read) on the 2nd floor to the super suite luxury cabins on the 11th floor. As poor students, we had booked a room on the 2nd floor, a small 4-bed cabin for the six of us. We were cramped.
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| Close Quarters |
Devon, taking a picture: ‘Why aren’t you smiling?’
Joe, slightly sarcastic but slightly serious: ‘BECAUSE I’M NOT HAPPY.’ He described how in the middle of the night he slicked his hair back and felt a thick layer of sweat on his forehead as if he had just been in a pool. I re-entered the room late, doing my school registration (starting at midnight) on the 7th floor, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea basically. That was epic, but entering the room was sauna time. Unhappy sauna time.
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