Fishy Friday

Our final day of briefs was a City Tour. One of the great services on base is an "Intercultural Relations" office staffed by three Italians. They do tours around the region, language classes, cooking classes, etc. So on Friday, we boarded a bus and took it to the Joint Forces Command (JFC), the NATO base here in Napoli. JFC is right downtown with a Metro Stop only a couple of blocks away. From there, our leader, Giuseppe, showed us how and where to buy the proper, public transit ticket, and off we went on the Metro. We wandered through a very nice little area in downtown that included a market.

We also visited Galleria Umberto again (aka, "the mall"), wandered down to the sea, then took a funicular up the hill to the area of Vomero. Vomero is lovely! A two block pedestrian zone that is lined with trees, breezy and cool compared to being down in the city, and unfortunately, full of apartment living only (and expensive apartments at that).  After a fun stroll through this area, back to the 2nd funicular line and down to the Naples seafront. While there is a nice, wide boardwalk here, it was hot, hot, hot! We did, however, get to stop and watch these fisherman clean their catch:

If you can't make out what he's cleaning, click on the photo to enlarge it. Then you should be able to see the tentacles wrapped around his arm.

We had a nice day out, which was a good ending to long days of sitting in the base theater listening to briefs. I'm so glad we had such a thorough orientation, and I really did enjoy most of it, but I'm exhausted! As someone described it, we got a "firehose" of information.

We've spent the weekend house-hunting, and I'll do an update on our search later today or tomorrow.