I don’t like much contemporary art, but I did like this display in our hotelWe hiked all the way back down to the port where we’d arrivedOur ferry off in the distanceVery few tourists left to leave Capri, our ferry was almost empty!The port of Napoli is pretty ginormousThe old castle is still guarding the portVery cool fountain, within sight of the big castleSee the McDonald’s on the bottom floor? Gotta admit we were tempted… but then again the European ketchup is so nasty
We spent the morning happily wandering down side streets at random, looking for an eventual lunch spot. Finally found one but it was on a surprisingly busy street, especially considering the street was all of five feet across.
We sat at our narrow outside table and watched the insane scooters & motorcycles & little trucks careen by madly—cannot believe this is a two-way street!
We watched pedestrians leap out of the way barely in time, heard the angry honks going off constantly, saw a few tense stand-offs while the contestants internally debated who was stronger… it just got funnier and funnier as the driving got more and more crazy. Just when you think you’ve seen the most insane driving move, here comes an even crazier one!
And then Sam spotted the best sign ever. So in the US, you might have a school zone, a worker zone….
An actual “Run For Your Life!!!” zone!! There must be a ton of these around Napoli now that I think of it…View down the street, a nonstop stream of angry scooters going in all directions; that angry grandma on the bike is probably doing 60View down the street in the other direction, you can see a couple of motorcycles at the far end, probably giving each other last ritesLunch was great tho, this might have been my best pasta of the trip…. and of course the local mussels are insanely goodSam had gnocchi, and those are deep-fried zucchini blossoms to the right (they were bad lol)Napoli got the snot bombed out of it in WWII, you look at some of these walls and wonder if that’s still damage from that era which just never got fixed?Even the restaurant bathroom has graffiti!! “Graffiti” must be an Italian word, come to think of itHere’s inside where you pay, you can watch the kitchen staff bicker in the back lol
So in my blog I give taxi drivers here a lot of grief haha but I will admit it’s a skill. You need one hand for the steering wheel, one hand for the phone, one hand to rest on the gear shift, one hand to stick lazily out the window, one or two hands to gesture with, one hand for your cigarette, at least two hands for the horn: I’m convinced the more elite drivers just use their foreheads for the latter and literally head-butt their steering wheels to honk the horn. And you have to master the art of driving in one direction while staring out in a completely different direction! All in all, I can appreciate that it’s not easy. Our driver home from the port was literally swiping through photos on his phone, showing us in the back seat things we might be interested in, while whipping through and around traffic, red lights, dogs & cats, you name it, pedal floored the whole time of course.
Those two guys are working on a mystery: one had laboriously pulled the seat off of a bike, then locked the bike away inside somewhere; now they have a hacksaw and are sawing away at the pole the seat is attached to…. we will never get to the bottom of this oneTypical Napoli street in this part of townAaaaaaaand finally back to our airbnb!
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