May 17

I woke up to an ambulance wailing down the alley nearby so I got up and waited until 9:00 because our host served us breakfast at 9:00. He served us croissants and bread for breakfast as well as juice. We were going to Herculaneum so we traveled to the metro station where we got on a train to Herculaneum. The train took about 30:00 and when it arrived we walked to the ruins of Herculaneum. We got to the ruins and we went down to the ruins where Mt. Vecuivies covered the city and its residents.  Here are some facts I learned. It blanketed the town, but buried everyone in molten ash. Like the nearby city of Pompeii, Herculaneum is famous as one of the few ancient cities to be preserved nearly intact, as the ash that blanketed the town protected it against weathering effects. Although less popular than Pompeii today, it was the first discovered Vesuvian city (in 1709). Pompeii was revealed in 1748 and identified as Pompeii in 1763. Unlike Pompeii, the ash was hotter which helped    preserve more wooden objects such as roofs, beds, and doors, as well as other things such as food and paper. Today, only a small bit of Herculaneum has been excavated. The focus is now to preserve the exposed areas of the city rather than digging up more. [1]

Herculaneum was a vacation town, because it was wealthier than Pompeii. We saw the boat houses containing skeletons of at least 300 people. After we studied the site we went out of the site. We were walking down a street looking for a taxi, we heard and saw a lady screaming “ Pizzas and sandwiches for sale at my restaurant!” And my dad thought it would be a great idea to ask her for a ride to the train station and he said “ what could go wrong?” She had to ask two people to move their cars so she could get her car out.  I said,” please don’t do this to me!” Once she got her car out of the shady parking lot we went in and my dad paid her 10 euros and she tried to swindle him out of ten more euros by saying she “didn’t have change for twenty.”  She finally gave up and we got into her car which had a random whisk, a stained pillow and laundry detergent by my feet! The seats were stained with baking soda and there were no seatbelts! My dad showed her where to go and she totally went to the wrong place by a volcano! My dad showed her where to go again and she didn’t have a rear view mirror so she used her make-up mirror to back up. She almost hit a car in the process of backing up and I tried to escape from the car while she was backing up! She finally turned around and she drove down a hill that could’ve blown her tires at any moment! She finally drove us to the train station and we went to get pizza. After we finished our pizza we went back to our apartment. After we went back to our apartment we went to sleep. I was just happy to be alive!