I had a fantastic time, and this blog’s going to be really long explaining everything I did :)

Tuesday 15th March
We flew to Rome from Liverpool Airport and landed at about 11:30pm. At Liverpool Airport, we’d been welcomed by one of the EF Tours guides who looked like Jesus and sounded like, ‘One time, at band camp…’, but with an English accent. It was funny :P Then at the other end, we were met by our guide Rosa (tiny, dark hair, great English) who stayed with us for the whole trip. The hotel was really nice; I was sharing a bedroom and bathroom with Em and Natalie (who didn’t know each other to start with).

Wednesday 16th March
Breeakfast was something like 8:45 am, then we had a walking tour of central Rome. It’s such a weird mix of old (2000 years old) and new, it was weird to see huge apartment blocks and big office buildings when on the other side of the street were parts of aquaducts and ancient remains of buildings, temples etc. After that we had some free time in Rome by ourselves, and Em, Natalie and I walked pretty much around the whole of Rome ()it’s not really that big, surprisingly), and saw the colossuem and the river and stuff. After that, we had dinner – the food included in the price of the trip wasn’t brilliant but generally okay – and then went on a tour of Rome by night on the coach. It was great. We also all paid the driver a bit more to take us to this place which was fairly difficult to get to, and when we got there the police told us we shouldn’t really be there so we had to rush a bit. It was a ‘keyhole’, difficult to explain, but when you looked through it you could see partts of Rome and right the way through a building and stuff…it wasn’t that brilliant, and it was hyped up too much but it was still interesting :)

Thursday 17th March
This day was the busiest and the most tiring. We met up with our guide for the day (we always had a professional, qualified guide for wherever we were going as well as Rosa), who showed us round the Colosseum, where all the bloodsports used to be held, and the ‘Forum Romanum’, which was basically the forum in Roman times where people would socialise, shop, conduct business etc.

Then we travelled to the Vatican (the Pope’s state) and saw the Sistine Chapel and St Peter’s basilica. The Sistine Chapel is absolutely amazing. Pcitures are just nowhere near as good as the real thing. It made me want to cry for some reason. We couldn’t go into the proper Vatican bit because it’s a spearate state and you need a pass, but we wandered round the museum and shops and stuff. By this time though we were really tired, it was hot for us English, and we’d been on our feet all day. We also went to one of the squares (there are quite a few in Rome) and had a look at the fountains and the shops and stuff.

After that we had a free evening in Rome, although the guide suggested we split up into groups with the teachers, of who wanted to go out and who didn’t. So in the end only about 7 of us decided to go out (Em, Nat and I, and a group from the other campus of our college who we didn’t know – we call them ‘Marpilians’ because the campus is called ‘Marple’, and there’s a bit of ‘friendly’ rivalry between us when we go on trips like these) because everyone was so tired/boring, and the two male teachers and Rosa decided to come with us. After one of the other teachers (she’s pretty bossy and gets stressed easily) told us we had to be back by 11 :S we left the hotel. But Rosa got us lost, and it took the metro and an hour bus journey later until we’d arrived at the student-y place with lots of bars and stuff. Rosa said we’d have a drink in one of them first and move on, but it was so good we ended up staying for the whole thing. We talked to the Marpilians and ended up getting on pretty well with them. It was a fantastic night and we stayed in the same bar until about midnight, when we staggered out. Someone asked Harvey (one of the teachers) to take a photo of us with a digital camera. He was holding it upside down and back to front and complaining he couldn’t see the viewfinder. It was absolutely hilarious. Then somebody turned it the right way and showed him what to do and he took a picture. Then Em was like, ‘I can’t believe he did that!’ (he didn’t even know he was holding the camera the wrong way until someone told him about 10 mins later) – and she was holding her camera weirdly and accidentally took a picture of herself!! So now she’ll have a fantastic picture of her chin to remind her of that night :P

Anyway, we got on a bus and the teachers started getting a bit panicky about having to face the evil teacher about why we were late. Harvey stood up in the bus (it was just us on it I think), and said in a really serious way, ‘Right, we need to get our story straight. There was a wild fox…’, at which point we all started laughing again. We spent about half an hour perfecting the story and it ended up as, the wire fox bit Lauren and we had to take her to the cattery and then she had dinner with the Pope and the Pope bit the bus driver…or something like that. The teachers had all been drinking these huge vodka shots and were probably more drunk then we were :P Anyway, we got off the bus and couldn’t find another to take us to the hotel, so we had to get three separate taxis. Harvey went in the first one, then our three with the other teacher, Mike. He paid for it too which was really nice of him. I remember Harvey calling him a bastard though because going in the first taxi meant he’d have to face the bossy teacher on his own lol. When we got back to the hotel though, the only one there was Harvey and he said that no one had even waited up for us so it was all okay. What wasn’t okay though, was that we had to be up at 5 am because there was a lot of travelling :S I’m never tired when I get in though so I packed and had a shower before I went to bed :P

Friday 18th March
Anyway, we dragged ourselves out of bed and down for breakfast, then travelled to Pompeii and had a tour of the ruins, a lot of which were preserved by the volcano that erupted in 79 AD. It was pretty good, but the tour guide was difficult to understand and very monotonous; we didn’t spend long there though. Then we went to Naples, which was a bit upsetting because it’s a rough area and parents send their kids out to beg and they are lots of stray dogs on the street and robberies and pickpockets and stuff. We had lunch there and went in a few shops though. Then we visited the Naples Archaeological Museum which has some fantastic displays and statues and stuff (and some very dodgy ones lol). After that, we got back on the coach and drove the rest of the way to Sorrento, a place which is apparently really tacky and cheap, but in my opinion is was better than Naples. The hotel was on the very edge and in a very rurual area so it was all good. We had a few hours free in the evening, but we were supposed to be going out the night after into town, so some people went to the hotel bar or the bar next door, and we just hung around the hotel bar for a while chatting to Marpilians, and then decided to get a fairly early night. We stayed up until about 11 in our room chatting, it was like a sleepover lol.

Saturday 19th March
We felt really refreshed after a good night’s sleep, and we took the boat to the island of Capri which is the most gorgeous place I have ever seen in my life. I don’t have any pictures yet, but this should give you an idea, and you can always use Google if you’re impatient to see more right now. We had a boat tour around a lot of the island, and also had a few hours’ shopping time; the shops were a weird combination of designer stores, souvenir places, jewellery stores, food places, tacky shops and unique shops (like coral jewllery stores with the coral from the island itself, a perfume shop with perfumes made from the island’s flowers etc.). When we came back, we noticed that one girl (who we didn’t like for various reasons) was looking really ill. She had diabetes and hadn’t been sticking to her diet, had been drinking too much and had lied about taking her insulin and stuff. So after we got back to the mainland, Rosa took her to hospital. The teachers were all really worried that they’d get blamed and stuff, and even wrote down the events of this day a couple of days later. One of them said that they might have just let her go back to the hotel and go to sleep if we hadn’t been on the island, and then she’d have died. If she’d had one more drink she would have gone into a coma. She was put on a drip and after 3 litres of fluid, she only went to the bathroom once she was so dehydrated.
We had a few free hours in Sorrento which was awful, it was really cold and there was next to nothing to do. We also had to go to a woodwork factory, which was vaguely interesting but very expensive (one chair was about 700 euros), and we could literally afford nothing there. The night out we were supposed to have was cancelled because Rosa and one of the teachers was at the hospital, so we just hung around the hotel again and chatted.

Sunday 20th March
We went to Herculaneum which was pretty much like Pompeiim and then walked up Mount Vesuvius, an active volcano. I guess I always thought of volcanoes like this, but it was actually like a huge hill, with plants and trees and stuff growing on it, and snow still melting. There were also random shops which I found quite funny/weird. They are expecting an eruption soon (it hasn’t erupted since 1944), and are drawing up emergency plans of how to evacuate people, minimise the damage etc. Then we drove back to Rome, but it took so long we were only just in time for dinner. We were in a different hotel and it was amazing. We had 2 bedrooms, a hall and a bathroom. The rooms had antique furniture, two TVs, two balconies, a big mini bar stocked with all kinds of food and drink, and a jacuzzi :D It really made up for the lack of clean towels and quite nasty bathroom at the Sorrento hotel. Apparently, Rosa said we were really lucky to get such a nice hotel because it rarely happens :P

Monday 21st March
We explored the Catacombs of Calistus with an Amercian Catholic Priest, and it was quite scary because they stretch for miles and it’s easy to get lost. One girl got quite claustrophobic (though it wasn’t that bad). There were loads of tombs, and then even showed us the remains of bodies from 2000 odd years ago. The priest was so nice and said a prayer for us and blessed us which was really nice. Then we had a couple of hours of free time in Rome, and then went to the airport to get the flight home. The diabetic girl won’t be home until Wednesday at the earliest, and for some reason her mum wouldn’t fly out (even though college are paying for the flight), so her uncle was going to fly out last night. Until then, the main teacher in charge stayed in a different hotel near the hospital, and he heard his wife has to have an operation on her foot tomorrow, but doesn’t want to leave the girl with another teacher/they won’t volunteer (I think a combination of the two), which is really unfair on him. One of the good things about sitting near the front of the coach is that you can always hear what’s going on ;)

Anyway, overall I had a fantastic time and I would recommend Italy to anybody, especially Capri because it’s so beautiful, and I definitely want to go back there :love: And if you read all of that without skimming/skipping, you must really love me lol.