Cruise - Day 4 - Napoli

Mount Vesuvius

 

After buying our cruise tickets, I think I was the excited most about going to Napoli. My only experience and knowledge of Napoli was the ballet Napoli which I have seen a number of times and love but of course – you know me – always gotta find something wrong about it.   And that one wrong very annoying thing was the dance with that damn noisy tambourine.  I just wanted to run up to the stage each time I saw that ballerina tip-toeing and hopping, swinging that tambourine high in the air and low on her hip. shshsshsh   shshshs  bang, shshshs shshshs bang, shshshs shshshshs bang – and just grab it out of her hand and give it one final bang over her head.   And pizza!  I knew Napoli was known for pizza.  Pizza was born in Napoli.  When Marco Polo was playing around on his horse in China and brought back his world famous recipe, now known as pasta, he was dreaming all the time of coming home and having pizza. 

 

I could fall in love with Anthony Bourdain.  He’s such a cool and debonair travel/chief television celebrity.  Do you know him?  He’s on the Discovery channel and Travel Channel among others.  His show is called “No Reservations”.     A few years ago Tony was in Napoli.  His presention of Napoli and Pizza was soooooo amazing I was just dying to pack my bags and go immediately.   And now here I was with a travel ticket in my hand to Napoli.  “I said, “Hey Jens, when we get to Napoli, we gotta eat some pizza!”   With a look on his face that said – you need a doctor – he questioned me, “Pizza? – Why pizza?”      “Are you chiding!!! Napoli is the birth place of pizza” I exclaimed.  “You can’t go to Napoli and not eat pizza”  I sassed with a tone of  - you’re not really from Europe, are you?   What planet did you say you come from?  Everybody knows pizza comes from Napoli.  That’s what my new boyfriend Toni told me.  Anthony Bourdain was on the hunt for the perfect pizza and to my amazement he found the place. 

Years later it’s now my turn to find the perfect pizza.  I go on-line and search for the top 10 things to do in Napoli.  I found a website that listed eating pizza and the number 1 thing to do in Napoli.  “See Jens, I told you!!! We gotta eat pizza when we get to Napoli”   This website listed 2 of the most popular pizza restaurants.  The writer of the site’s favorite was number 2 on the list.  I printed out a map from Google Earth and plotted out a route from port to pizzerias.  Both pizzerias were near each other and I put a big yellow pin on each of the destination points.   I can hardly wait to sink my teeth into Napolitano pizza!  This is gonna be great!

But dear god – first we gotta stand in line and go through security all with the other 3,000 passengers.

My Google Earth map shows that it’s about a mile from ship to pizza.  The ship backed up into its reserved dock.  We back next to this huge very old looking ship.  It’s huge yet from our ship we are able to look down upon it and this photo is not even taken from the highest deck.

 

The port is right in town.  Once we are off the boat we are almost attacked by very aggressive taxi drivers and there were hundreds of them all competing for our euro.  I wouldn’t be surprised if fights among the taxi drivers break out every now and then.  There were also about 60 horse and carriages lined up and it looked romantic but prices were not listed and with all the aggressiveness, we just stuck to our new discount sports shoes to get us where we wanted to go.

 

Ok – we are in for a major disappointment.  The town is nothing like it was on the TV cooking show.  Tony – waw hawppen? ju lie to me.  Well I just couldn’t believe this place.  My description of it is: a really dirty swap meet.  Actually I never seen a swap meet as bad as this – well wait – ever been to Tijuana?  It’s a toss up of which is worse.  Probably Napoli because of the prices.  

 

 

All the streets looked more like back alley ways and places to avoid.  The traffic and the noise! – which now I know that damn Napoli tambourine represents the noise, hustle and bustle of the town.

 

Offerings to the gods of environmental cleanliness? 

 

The city was so run down even the trees could not survive there.

The website I read about praises the city for being the original store fronts and apartment building from Creasers’ time or something like that.  But I am sure the real reason why this town is in such despair is because they know that sooner or later Mt. Vesuvius is gonna blow and when she does it will wipe out the city.  CNN will report it as a disaster but it will be a blessing for the city.  Think of is as Mother Nature’s way of cleaning house.

 

Every square inch is so precious in this town that space can not be wasted on corner gas stations.  Instead the pumps are right on the side walk.

At our half way point we decided to take a coffee break.  One thing I gotta say about Italian coffee – it’s the best you can get.  So here we are on this square as you can see on the map I am holding.

  

 

Then we finally get to pizzeria.  From the end of the street I can see the place because there is a long line of people waiting to get in.  We get up to the pizzeria and it looks just like the picture on the web so I know I’ve got the right place.  You can order at the huge big window/door opening or walk one step up from the street and you are actually in the kitchen where you can see from the street your pizza being made in a big flaming rock oven.  You have to walk through the kitchen to get to the dinning room.  Naturally we wanted to eat inside and take in all the senses of sight, smell and touch and most importantly taste – but not so much hearing as we have heard enough Italian on the ship.   Just as we are about to enter the dinning room we are told to wait out side as there was not enough seating.  People were pouring out of the tiny place and we waited and waited and waited.  They never called us in and we just couldn’t continue to wait standing. I could tell Jens wanted to go.  And I’m thinking – no way – I didn’t do this Christopher Columbus cruise searching for the New Pizza and right at my finger tips, turn back – no way.  I said to Jens, “Let’s just wait 5 more minutes and then we’ll go.”  We waited 10 and finally I said, “ok Jens, let’s go but I’ll just get whatever they are serving here at the window.”  They were pulling out all kinds of hot steamy things out of the oven that we have never seen before and people in line were snapping them up as fast as they were coming out of the oven.  There was some kind of ob-long golden bread things.   (George – remember those Lango Hungarian bread things we ate in Budapest?  It sort of was like that.)   Ok I told the guy who took our name that we are going to go.  He never called out any names and only took one other name after us.  And he kept telling people to wait.  Very busy place.  I pointed and said, “ just gimme one of those and one of those – were gonna go.”  While he was packing up these bread things that we’ve never seen before, the pizza chef dumped- literally dumped – a batch of pizzas into the display box where all the other food was.  “And gimme one of those!” I happily said with big smiling eyes.  Yeah!!!!! I’m gonna get my pizza!!!!.  He put it all in a bag and handed it to me.  I waited to hear how much I had to pay but he went on to he helped others.  “Well how much do you want for all of this?” I asked.  He held up 3 fingers.  I couldn’t believe it – a pizza, a bread thingy and a round brown ball of something for only 3 Euro.   We walked to a near by bench and began shoving the real thing into our face.  Wow this brown ball is pretty good. What in the world is it?  It looked like macaroni with melted mozzarella cheese, breaded and then fried in a ball shape.  It was really yummy.  Yes that’s the word I want to use.  Wish I could say fantastic or even spetttacolo (the word I hate most right now) but yummy is the best I can do.  And then the golden flat bread thing.  I bit into it and screamed because it was so damn hot and when I screamed, boiling hot melted ricotta cheese fell out of my mouth and onto my pants and burnt my knee.  I just saw the bread come out of the oven.  I didn’t know or see that it was filled with cheese.  It was really good once it cooled down – the bread and my knee.  But I was sorry after I ate it because it was fried I guess or lots of oil in the batter because it felt like I had swallowed the Exxon Valdez.

But now the big excitement.  What I have been waiting for all these days – real Italian pizza –ummmmmmmm……. Wait.  Let me try another bite.  Humm. “Here Jens, try a bite”…….. “Whaddaya think?”   “Well…. It’s not as good as Dino’s”.           And there you have it folks.   Just because Henry Ford invented the Production Line, doesn’t necessarily mean that the Model T is the best car one can drive.  And so like everything else.  The pizza has found its way around the world and has been worked and rework to perfection.  But like the town of Napoli itself, nothing has changed. Domino’s or your favorite neighborhood pizzeria surely has just as good and most likely way better pizza than this historic pizzeria in Napoli.   

 These 3 pizza photo are not mine but are from the net.  This is however the place and what the pizza and round ball looked like.  I don't have a picture of the flat bread that burned me.  The big fat guy behind the display case was the one who sold me the whole schemer for 3 euro.

Our waiters - Sacra from Bali and Georhge the only white waiter from Romania.

 

Finally after another security check and x-ray scan and we are back on the boat and ready for an Italian themed dinner.  How that was different from the other evenings is not really understood.  I guess it was the baked Alaska that makes one evening not Italian even though risotto-this and risotto-that is all over the menu cards – every night.

 

This must be some sort of special Italian cake.  Not really an explosion of flavor but fun and bizarre.  The cake had a very dry look to it but when you put it in your mouth, it was wetter than a soaked sponge.  How did they do that?  It was dry on the plate, dry on the folk and then swimming in your mouth.   Funny.

 

Ok I really wanted to kill this woman – the one with the mic.  I lost all patients with her and I think it is most likely she was the last straw that broke the camels back.  Every night she was the one screaming out the bingo number in 5 languages and presenting the evenings entertainment as well in 5 languages.  Here she is presenting different restaurants on the ship and what you can get in the restaurants and she was really pushing the cocktails at the TEX – MEX restaurant.  But in all 5 languages – French, German, Spanish, English and naturally , Italian.  She kept saying TEX-ah – MEX-ah.  And she doesn’t just say get some tasty drinks in the restaurant – it’s a long commercial as long as this blog in 5 languages.   Shut the F#%K UP I kept saying under my breath. Oh and of course the drinks are “Specttacolo”  the bingo prizes are “Specttacolo”,  the ship is  “Specttacolo” , the service on ship is “Specttacolo” ,  and she used the Italian word “Specttacolo”  no matter which language she was using and she used it every day and every night in every broad cast blasting on every built-in cheap speaker throughout the ship.  Specttacolo is similar to the Danish word Spectakel and that translates into English as Noise and that is what the woman was - Noisy!  Damn Noisy – I can still hear her.

So tonight you can win one of these great drinks from the Mexah Texah restaurant if you can guess how many bars there are on the ship.  The correct answer layees and gemmen is 20.  Yes, that’s right 20 bars.  I didn’t even have 20 drinks.  The ship as I say is huge.  

Now this was something else that drove me nuts.  I know I am not perfect in Danish and I can appreciate the difficulty it is to learn a language mush less 5 of them.  I would love to be able to speak just one more foreign language.  It’s ok if you make mistakes but if you are the speaker of the sip and constantly talking to 3,000 people every day, all day, you can at least learn how to say Ladies and Gentlemen.  Almost every 3^rd sentence in English she started out as: Layees and Gemmen.

Layees and Gemmen you buy-a da tasty drink-ah at de Tex-ah Mex-ah restaurant-eh.  

But ok – enough about that.  The show was entertaining and a good way to kill some expensive floating time and we were just glad to be sailing away from tambourine land.