That's a sin and you should full well know that! You should be eating your way through countries! I arrived directly to the Pompei ruins before midday, ready for a full on afternoon getting in amongst it.
The ruins are HUGE. I didn't really find out how big until I had been wandering around for a couple of hours and still finding big areas I had not even discovered yet. And it is really interesting to get a snapshot of what life was like so long ago.
There was a lot of paintings and mosaics that had survived which were quite interesting to see. One of the more disturbing things in the plaster casts of the bodies that were found after Vesuvius erupted. Some huddled in their huts, one mother and child, and even a dog. So that was the good, here is the not so good. Usually the audio-guides are just for the lazy people who can't be bothered to read. Not so at Pompei. There is literally no information provided throughout the ruins. So I had no idea what I was looking at.
Unless, of course, you give it some context. It turns out that there is a map, but often they do not give it to you when you buy the ticket. So you will pay to take the guided tour. Sneeky skeeky. While wandering around I met this crazy Bulgarian guy who asked if I knew where some kind of sex room was. I said 'I don't know what kind of party you think this is, buddy, but you have the wrong place He started telling me about how there was a brothel, and they would have orgies there or something.
I thought he was just some crazy dude, but he looked in his guide book and lead us there; it turns out he was right! There are these murals on the wall showing Dirty buggers After a few hours wandering around I decided to give up. I really hadn't even scratched the surface. You could spend days in that place, but again, the ruins kind of loose their significance when you have no information.
