Day 5: Naples, er, Rome

Day 5, Thanksgiving, dawned quite a bit earlier than any of us had planned. I woke up around 3:30 and discovered that John had quietly been getting sick since before midnight. I gave him some tylenol I’d brought (as he had a fever) and some saltines, but without getting too graphic, he was no better at keeping those down than he’d been anything else. Around 5 I started looking for the local hospital in Joel!’s guidebook, and around 5:30, I pushed John out the door so that we could walk down there (a five-minute walk, really this time!) and he could get some medicine. He’d already probably started off a bit dehydrated from our hike the previous day (I know I was) and he wasn’t able to keep any fluids down, and we were supposed to have a  full day ahead of us in Naples, and then head on to Rome.

We were staying in Sorrento, which is a tourist town, so I expected that there had to be *someone* in the hospital who would at least speak a bit of English. Apparently this isn’t the case at 5:30 in the morning. However, they were able to produce a doctor from another floor who spoke a bit of Spanish, so I spoke to her in Spanish and she spoke to the ER doc in Italian, and the process was reversed for her to speak back to me. It worked fairly well. They gave John a bed and hooked him up to an IV with some anti-nausea stuff and fluids, and when that one was done they started another one. All in all, we were there for about three hours.

Now, I didn’t bring my camera with me. Shockingly, it didn’t even occur to me — I was more worried about John. But I did have my phone with me, and in those long, chilly hours of sitting on his bed (no spare chair) my urge to document things overtook my sense of niceness, and I took a picture of him lying in the bed.

I'm sure the karma I ruined for taking this will come back to haunt me someday. Sorry John, you knew I had to post it. :-)

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Ok, let me just say something — this hospital? TOTALLY no-frills. No seat (not lid, SEAT) on the toilet in the bathroom, no extra chairs in the ER (which was just one room with a couple of not-used portable screens) and you had to bring your own blanket if you were cold. Fortunately John had brought his snowboarding jacket (the one he brought because this trip was supposed to have much cooler weather than we actually encountered) because he still had a fever and he was shivering like crazy. But in the end, neither of us were complaining about what the hospital lacked. Why? Because on the discharge papers, the ER doc wrote him down as an Italian citizen, and didn’t charge us a thing for 3 hours  in a hospital bed and a couple of liters of IV fluid and anti-nausea drugs. Sweet! They did write him a prescription for a few things, which I went and picked up after returning John to the hotel, and this brought the only souvenir we acquired this whole trip (despite my repeated threat to steal one of the black street cobblestones in Rome and bring it back with me) — a box of Tylenol suppositories. I mean, come on — how many people can say they’ve been to Italy and brought back a box of Tylenol suppositories? And hey, they worked better than anyone could have expected — all John had to do was LOOK at the box and the thought alone of having to use them was enough to make him stop barfing. :-D

All together, the prescriptions cost around $40, but it was worth it to get him feeling a bit better.

When we returned, Joel! went to talk to the hotel’s proprietor and let him know we’d be checking out a bit late. We let John catch about three hours of much-needed sleep while we retooled our plans for the day. Instead of going to Naples, we’d head straight to Rome, try to check into the hotel early, leave John there to get some sleep, and Joel! and I could head out into the city in search of other cool things to see. Train tickets were procured, multiple trains were taken, and hotel rooms were checked into. With John tucked into bed with a bottle of electrolytes and an empty trash can, Joel! and I headed out into the city… and promptly got lost. Ok, not lost, just not where we were supposed to be, by a long shot. Turns out that there are many streets with irritatingly similar names, and it also turns out that while both of us are pretty good with directions, Joel! is a lot more tolerant of being misdirected than I am.

It was almost dark by the time we found our first destination of the afternoon evening — Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini. This was one of the things on my list because it looked neat. What is it? In case you didn’t click on that Wikipedia link a couple of sentences ago (see, I even gave it to you again!) it’s a crypt underneath a church where they ran out of room and started stacking bones along the walls and decorating with them. Much to my sadness, we weren’t allowed to take pictures, but, er, Joel!’s camera may have inadvertently gone off once or twice. Might have accidentally done so. And the next day when John and I went to see it, his video camera may have accidentally turned on whilst hanging out of his pocket. Don’t you hate it when those things happen?

So yeah, here are some pictures that we most definitely didn’t intend to take. More, as always, in my Flickr Italy gallery. These are definitely ones you should click on to get more detail — so so crazy! I’ve had people say to me that they felt it was morbid or somehow wrong… Yeah, this is probably why the Italian government outlawed construction of similar crypts (and continued work on existing ones) sometime in the 1800s. But to me, it was kind of like seeing BodyWorlds – it’s amazing to me to see the beauty of the human body, especially parts we take for granted but so rarely see. Mark Twain visited here in the 1800′s–here’s a piece of an account he wrote about seeing it.

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We had a fun time playing guess-the-anatomy. The human body is an amazing and beautiful contraption...

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Scythe and scales. Circle of bone around the skeleton is supposed to represent the womb, therefore the whole thing stands for life and death. Oh, and that's a child's skeleton.

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After we left the crypt, we went upstairs to the church to wander around for a bit. We only lasted a few minutes, though, when we heard drumming and lots of noise outside. We’d seen police out earlier, and it’d looked like they’d been getting ready to close off the street, so we thought we were in for a parade.

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Turns out we got a labor demonstration instead — the drumming we heard was actually was people pounding hard hats onto the ground.

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The police did close a street off (the church is right by Piazza Barberini) and there were tons more standing around, holding (but not wearing) full riot gear. Awesome!

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So, me being the foolhardy curious person I am, who’s always up for photographing a good demonstration, I waded right in.

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Of course, this was the ONE day the entire trip that I, for some reason, took my 50mm f/1.4 lens out of my bag (a lens that handles low-light situations extremely well, and that you don’t have to be right in someone’s face to take a picture, unlike the wide angle lens I used pretty much the entire trip) and left it back at the hotel. Major :facepalm:. So I used the wide angle lens, and while I did have to get right up close to people to take pictures, I’m REALLY impressed with how well it handled low light! I mean, it was dark enough that I wouldn’t have been able to read a newspaper without being right underneath a streetlight or something, but these came out pretty well, considering that I didn’t use a flash. Sweet!! I think I was the only photographer there who wasn’t using a flash.

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I have to admit that I really, really missed my 70-200 f/4L lens. While it definitely would have been the wrong lens for this (NOT a nighttime lens!), it’s a lot of fun for crowd stuff. I’ll just have to find me some daytime protest rallies sometime. It’s not like I don’t live within easy walking distance of the state capitol or anything… :-)

Anyway, after we got tired of wandering around protesters, we headed off to find the Trevi Fountain and Pantheon, which weren’t actually all that far away (Piazza Barberini, where the rally was, is on the same Metro stop as the Trevi Fountain.) A nice walk later, we were people-watching at the Trevi and eating gelato. Yum.

Because it seemed like fun, I decided to take a lousy cameraphone picture.

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Just how wide is that wide-angle lens I was using? Check out the following pictures.

Exhibit A: The cameraphone shot.

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Exhibit B, the wide-angle picture: taken from the same exact place as Exhibit A.

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Ummm, yeah. BIG difference there.

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Pretty decent crowd for 8PM on a Wednesday in November, I thought. Note the official Italian autumn/winter uniform of jeans and a black jacket. This was almost universally true regardless of where we went. Joel had brought a black sweater, so he was able to go native for a day, but neither John nor I had brought black jackets, so we didn't blend in as well.

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After the Trevi, we hoofed it over to the Pantheon, and I was surprised it was still open, as it was pushing 9PM by the time we got there.

Not HDR, just the lens picking up a heck of a lot of light.

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The Pantheon was originally built in the 1st century AD as a temple to the Roman gods, and has been in continuous use since that time. In the 7th century AD, the Christians co-opted it for their own use as a church to St. Mary and the Martyrs.  Several notable people are buried there, including one of the kings of Italy, and the painter Rafael.

Random fact -- since its construction in 126 AD, it has been the world's largest unsupported concrete dome. Neat, and so so beautiful!!

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Another neat fact (to me, anyway) is that the hole in the dome allows the rainwater in, and there are 22 small drains in the floor for the water to drain into. There's something there that fascinates me -- not sure what, though.

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After the Pantheon, we waited what seemed like an eternity for a series of buses that didn’t want to show up. There was one route that was much more direct to our hotel, but we waited and waited and didn’t see it. We had the option of taking a more frequent but longer, less-direct bus, but it’s tricky — what happens when you get on the less desirable bus, only to turn around and see your bus pulling up behind the one you’re now stuck on? We ended up taking the more frequent, less-direct bus, and fortunately we didn’t have the frustration of seeing the bus we’d been waiting for pull up behind us… but it was still a long wait.

Back at the hotel, we roused a still-sleeping John, who assured us that he most definitely did NOT want to have a Thanksgiving dinner, so Joel! and I went out in search of food, before going back to the hotel and crashing. Last year, I had Ethiopian food in Washington DC for my Thanksgiving dinner, and this year I got to have Italian food in Rome. I wonder where I’ll be next year…