Stealing cookies in Naples

Saturday was P-day, a very full and long one, as you will see. We got up early (short on sleep) and left the house at 6:30am for Napoli (Naples), walking about 15 minutes to the nearest Metro stop (subway) at Jonio, with the Balzottis and the Knieses. It was good for us to finally learn how to get there on foot, as it will be useful for other trips. Each Metro ticket is 1.5 euros (about $2), which is a pretty good deal, and we keep a small reserve of tickets in our wallets.

From Jonio we took the Metro to Termini train station downtown, where we caught the 8am Frecciarossa (fast!) train to Napoli, arriving by 9am. These new fast trains are awesome, going at about 180mph at peak speed. There were five missionary couples on the train, and we met two others down there. The Hydes (far left in the photo below), who are stationed in Napoli, were our tour guides. 

The Naples subway at the central train station is quite beautiful inside, particularly going down three levels of escalator. Amazingly, there was no graffiti.

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We each bought a day pass for 3.5 euro. Here is an interesting photo of our group, looking up at ceiling mirrors near the subway ticket place, plus a more standard photo of the some of the group.

 

The Hydes first took us to De Paola jewelers, which is a subway ride and a good uphill hike away. De Paola specializes in cameos and has been a favorite spot for missionaries for nearly 50 years. In fact, Dee visited it during her first mission (less than fifty years ago, vbg). They even make some cameos with the angel Moroni for their LDS market (none in stock Saturday), and the owners give a 50% discount to missionaries. All the women bought something, some for gifts, so it took a while! 

 

 

 

Renato De Paola (in the light blue sweater) also had photos of groups of missionaries from the early and mid-1970s, some of whom were recognized by those in our group who served back then. The bottom photo was taken shortly before Dee began her first mission and includes her mission president, Leopoldo Larcher, with his wife and two children, as well as her companion Marian Dearden  (far right) and another sister from her district, Sister Norwood (third from left). Sisters made up about 10% of that mission in those days.

 

Finally we left De Paola and headed to the funicolare (tram) to go back downtown, about a ten minute walk. When we got to the funicolare, we realized that my wife wasn't in the group. About that time I got a call from her -- she had never left De Paola, needing to exchange the earrings she had bought for a nice necklace, and nobody noticed she wasn't walking with us. In retrospect, the group was probably a bit too large to manage well, particularly with the crowds on a holiday weekend. Anyway, my wife didn't know where we were, and we had gone a different way back than when we arrived. So Anziano Knies, a jogger, started running back to the store, while I walked fast. He got there a few minutes earlier than I did and started back with my wife, with everyone else waiting at the funicolare. Anziano Knies was very solicitous of her for the rest of the day! She now calls him Anziano Shepherd. Here is her necklace:

 

And here is the view going down the funicolare, plus a photo of the riders:

From there we walked through downtown, hitting huge crowds. There was one point where we had a human traffic jam for about 5 minutes (shades of things to come!) and could barely move. We finally got to "Christmas Street", which is open all year and where they sell every kind of Christmas decoration imaginable, including a lot of nativity scenes of various types and sizes. For some unfathomable reason (in retrospect), we decided to walk the three blocks. There was an enormous press of humanity, moving maybe six inches per second when we were lucky, so it took an hour, during which time it was too crowded to even try to shop for anything. Some of us got through twenty minutes earlier than otherss. I guess they were much nicer and less aggressive than we were!

By this point, it had been over seven hours since breakfast or access to a bathroom for most of us, so we were hungry and tired. Unfortunately, apparently so was everyone else in Naples! We walked into a few pizzerie and restaurants, who looked at us like we had holes in our head when we asked "do you have a table for 12 right now?" So we started walking toward our next sightseeing spot, looking for a place maybe to get some pizza by the slice along the way. Several restaurants said that they would have a spot for us "soon", maybe 15 minutes, which of course means closer to an hour. 😟

Still hungry and wet (it had started raining by then), we got to the Capella Sansevero, where they have an amazing statue called Cristo Velato -- the veiled Christ -- that we all wanted to see. You can read about it here. We all went to buy tickets, and I was about to give my cash to the woman, but then she said that the line was two hours long. We only had three hours left to eat and get back the train, so we gave up on that idea.  It looks like we're coming back another day.

Finally, having walked several miles and being hungry and resourceful, we stopped at a pastry store. As they say, "eat dessert first; you never know what will happen". This is where the story gets interesting. The place was crowded -- are you surprised? The way it works is that you go to the cash register and tell them what you want and pay for it, then you go to the pastry showcase, give them the receipt and they wrap everything up for you. Not terribly efficient, imo, and it makes it hard to browse. Anyway, I took a little package of almond cookies from a shelf near the entrance, waited in line to pay, and told the clerk: "I want these cookies and also two sfogliatelle and one cannolo" [both are luscious pastries]. I paid for it and my wife took the receipt to the clerk where the goodies were. Meanwhile I opened my bag of cookies and started chomping away. We left the store with our pastries in a shopping bag and ate them on the way back to the station. Later, on the train home, my wife asked "why did you buy two bags of the cookies?", and I said "I thought you bought the other one". Apparently the clerk thought I had meant to give us a bag of cookies like the one I had in my hand, while I meant that I would take and eat this particular bag. So effectively I stole the cookies, albeit inadvertently! We will pay them back next time we got to Naples😊. In the meantime, on Sunday we decided to donate the stolen cookies to our bishop's storehouse, which is a cabinet of food he keeps at church to help out the needy. I guess that will help soothe our conscience.

A church had an incredible display of nativities. In Italy, they often set the birth of Christ in the traditional daily life of Italians with peasants cooking pizza and herding animals and playing instruments, all set about a hundred years ago. It's wonderful!

The ones for sale are similar:

We then walked back to the train station. The whole day was definitely an adventure we won't forget, and the company was great! We'll go back on a Wednesday early next year when the crowds will be far smaller.

Arriving at the station, we all hit the restrooms upstairs at Burger King, over nine hours from leaving home! BTW, restroom use costs 1 euro. Then Anziano Balzotti took some of us on the hunt for the favorite pizza spot of the local missionaries, a few blocks from the station. We decided not to sit down in the restaurant but managed to balance them on our laps on the stairs inside the station without too much mess.

 

 

Our train left just before 5pm and arrived back in Rome by 6pm, after which we took the Metro back to Jonio and walked home, arriving just after 7pm. We then decided to run out to Lidl for a bit of food shopping for us. When we got to our car, there was a parking ticket on it 😟. Turns out that the guy who had parked to our left was covering the yellow lettering on the road which says "Bus Stop", so I had inadvertently parked on the very edge of that zone, just partly over a faint yellow line hardly visible in the dark. My (reasonable?) assumption had been that, by parking between two cars, I couldn't be illegally parked. Sigh. I wonder if the other guy got a ticket too? Luckily the fine is only 29 euro.

At 10pm our time, we had a planned video call with our son Wes and his new girlfriend, Alyssa, whom we haven't met. We were so exhausted by then that we asked if we could move the time up a bit, because staying awake until 10pm seemed an insurmountable task. Fortunately, they accommodated us, and we did a WhatsApp video call for a few minutes. Alyssa is very nice. She teaches English at a junior college, and over Thanksgiving she also deftly handled meeting my father-in-law for the first time, which can often be an interesting experience.

Then we collapsed into bed. What a day! We sure enjoy the other senior missionaries. Also, it's just amazing to be here in Italy and have so many things to see.