It is the traveler only who is foreign…

Ok, let me start this off by saying that I am not an outfit repeater. These snaps are from the same day as those from my Pompeii post. I really need to push through these vacation snaps a bit faster! I narrowed about 450 photos down to around 30 to share with all of ya'll!

Anyway, these are from a site near Pompeii, called Ercolano. That's what it is in Italian. I honestly, can't remember what it is called in English. It is similar to Pompeii in that it was buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, but it is different because it was engulfed in what is called a pyroclastic flow, aka: a mass of uber hot gas that oozes out of and down the sides of a volcano. Basically, the people in this town, instead of being buried under ash, had the skin, etc. melted right off of them. At the bottom of the photo below are 6 arches. These were docks, as the waterline used to reach right up to them. The photo below that is of two skeletons (this snap was taken from the same place I took the photo of the arches… yay camera zoom!) that have been preserved in the positions in which they died, waiting for boats to rescue them.

Ercolano was pretty amazing because it is better preserved than Pompeii. You can get a real sense of the way the city was laid out and can imagine the lives of the people who lived here. I played retail worker in the ruins of a shop, twirled around a dining room painted black (with elephant tusk ivory that was burnt and blackened) and got to wander around on 2000-year old mosaics that are much like those we see in kitchens, bathrooms and spas today!

I'll leave you with this quote that really sums up the way I am starting to feel about the world: "There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign"- Robert Louis Stevenson