Weekend in Italy

Pompeii, Italy

When tickets are 30 euros round trip, it's hard to refuse a spontaneous trip to Bari, Italy. That's exactly what happened one weekend in January after school restarted. As we all know, January starts off exciting but soon that fades away and becomes rather gray. So Katie, Lydia, and I decided we needed to go and find some sun. We were going to have a long weekend mid-January and so decided to look at flights where it would be sunny. We decided upon going to Bari because the flights were cheap and the times were right. We left on a Friday evening and landed in Bari, Italy which is a coastal town on the southeastern side of the boot. We spent Saturday walking around the town and and enjoying good Italian food. The weather was definitely warmer than Vienna's but it was still on the chilly side, especially if you were in the shade. The historic part of the city was easy to walk around and we pretty much saw everything we wanted to see in one day.

But wait, we still had one more day left because our flight Sunday wasn't leaving until 19:00 so what were we going to do all day? We went to the airport and rented a car for the day for a grand total of 24 euros when you include the insurance. We ended up with a cute Fiat and drove across the boot of Italy to see Pompeii. The drive there was nice and we got to see some great views of the coast the closer we got to Pompeii. It was somewhere I never thought I'd go to see so it was cool to see all the ruins and see Mt. Vesuvius in the distance. While a lot of the city has been excavated, it is estimated that one-third of the city is still buried. However, more resources are being used for the maintenance of the city that is already uncovered since it is in danger of buildings falling apart and frescoes disappearing due to weather, tourism, and geological shifts in the Earth's plates. We spent about 2.5 hours walking around and we didn't even see half of the excavated city. Then we drove back to the airport and caught our flight home. For a spontaneous weekend, this one was pretty great.