Remnants at Paestum

After were were too tired to walk any more at Pompeii, we got back to our car and headed to the city of Paestum. We arrived in the early evening at our destination, the ruined city of Paestum. Paestum began as a Greek city, and eventually came into roman hands. It was eventually abandoned, possibly due to malarial infection. The main attraction are the 3 well preserved temples, belonging to Hera, Apollo, and Athena. Amongst the temples are other excavated ruins of the city, including a small amphitheater and a roman amphitheater

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We spent some time wandering around the temples, reading what little I was able to find on the Internet of the cities history.

My own backyard of Nashville has a replica of the Parthenon in Greece, and these temples are after the same fashion. It is known as Doric, and can be distinguished from other Greek styles (Ionic and Corinthian) by the fat columns with unembellished capitols.

As the sun began to set, it was time for us to find out hotel.

Our Hotel for the night was Hotel Zi Carmela. The first problem we had was that we couldn't find the place. This was because the street name we had was not the name of the street anymore. It is, however, the only major cross street in the city. I don't wish to go into the details, but we wasted quite a bit of time trying to locate this place. Once there, we decided to eat at the hotel, which was serving a prix fix meal, rather than go out to a restaurant. A prix fix meal simply means that they will serve several pre determined courses. sometimes there is a choice between 2 or even 3 prix fix options, but often, there is only one, as was the case at this hotel. However, being that a) we didn't really speak Italian, and they really didn't speak English b) it was a sea side resort town and c) I have a hard time eating most sea food... It was a very poor decision on our part.

The first thing served was some sort of potato crab cake. These were good, and I didn't notice the seafood in it really. We were served with a bottle of dry white table wine (a type I hate) and sparkling water (which is bitter and not my favorite). Then they brought out fresh slices of tomato with slices of cheese. Jake liked this, but it wasn't for me. Then there was pasta with some sort of sea food. I picked at this and began to feel sick. Finally they brought out a plate of what I can only describe as raw fish pieces. There was definitely a tentacle in there. I gave up all pretense at this part and left the table to go back to our room, leaving Jake to finish the meal, and the bottle of wine, alone. What's more is I'm sure we made a very bad impression on them.

As a special bonus for reading all that, here's some photos I left out of my blog about Pompeii. 1 is of the colonnade at the boy's school, and the other is of the unusual amphitheater style with external steps.