Hello!

We left off in Naples, with our day trip to Pompeii. We made the mistake of not picking up a map or buying an audioguide at the gate and spent the next 3 hours walking around ruins which all look the same and having no way to differentiate them! The preserved bodies were quite interesting though, it was odd looking in a glass box at some poor guy who died 2000 years ago! Pompeii is definitely somewhere to go back to and do properly.

From Naples we made our way up to Rome, eventually getting there after a scare, as all the trains to Rome were fully booked apart from one which was ridiculously slow. Our first day we planned to do 3 walking tours, but we were the only people on the first one and the next 2 cancelled on us! We looked at St Peter's basilica but decided against queueing to get in and went over to the Colosseum, making sure to buy an audioguide this time! Although I didn't use it right and could never see what was being described... The Colosseum is a lot more impressive from the outside, on the inside you can hardly tell that it wss an ampitheatre as no seats are left and they've taken up 2/3 of the floor to show the underground passages. It was still worth the money to see though! We had a good dinner that night, ordering 2 bowls of pasta each of which could easily have fed 3 people, for only €7!

Day 2 of Rome started with a visit inside of St Peter's basilica. It's a very impressive church, but was odd in the fact that some deceased Popes were on show in glass cages- one who died in the 17th century! We then visited the 'tomb of the Popes' where most of them are buried, the latest Pope had quite a crowd- it's a very strange tourist attraction
If I was religious I'd be incredibly annoyed by the amount of american tourists with huge cameras round their necks, cameras flashing at everything which is supposed to be holy and important. Apparantly the church gets around 24, 000 visitors a day! The latter part of our last day in Rome was spent looking around some Roman ruins, by this time I was a bit bored of ruins, but the entry was included on our Colosseum ticket so we thought we'd make the most of it!

We landed in Venice that night and had a rubbish and expensive meal as the area our hostel is in is dead. We spent today just walking around the city, not looking at our map, just getting lost in the maze of small streets and bridges. We soon discovered that their are only a handful of different shops: ones that sell masks, expensive designer shops, restaurants and ice cream shops. It's a really cool plave but not somewhere you could spend too long in. We really wanted a gondala ride but got quoted €80 and decided that it might be a little out of our budgets... If I wasn't on a budget, this is the type of place where I'd blow all of money on food and souvenirs. I've already found a mask I want and am seriously considering getting a cape/ cloak...

Tomorrow will be spent in a similar fashion, just exploring the city and eating ice cream (food in Venice isn't as good as the rest of the country but their ice cream is cheap and brilliant) before boarding a night train to Salzburg, Austria.