Capri

Last Tuesday we took a ferry from Napoli to the gorgeous island of Capri. It was absolutely beautiful, but so hot! (And expensive) It's a major tourist spot, so it was crowded, but it was a lot of fun. We went up to on of the towns in a taxi with a driver who was working on his stand-up comedy. There were a lot of us and the group in the tack behind us could hear how loud we were laughing. The water there was the warmest sea water I've ever been in. I never wanted to get out! You could see right to the bottom and there were hardly any nasty fishy things to swim with (I don't do marine life.)

A giant tile map of Capri. I was standing on a terrance one story above this when I took this photo.

The natural pure white sunlight of the island makes the colors of the flowers seem even more saturated. (We were lost when I took this one. Adrian sent us down the wrong street to get back down to the port we needed to be at. And it was all downhill, so climbing back to the top in the ridiculous heat was not fun.)

A view from the top of the island

Another view from the saw spot.

And one more.

I guess this is one of the mot recognizable things on Capri. I just thought it was neat, so I took a picture of it. 

We're planning to go back to Capri one more time so we can rent speedboats for the day and just cruise around the island and drink and swim. Some other people from our department did that while we were there, but the rest of us wanted to see the island first. 

Liz's EPIC birthday

So this wasn't an excursion, but it certainly was an adventure. Liz, one of the lounge techs, had a birthday last week so we decided to do a ship crawl and hit almost all the bars on the ship and end in crew bar. It was a night of shenanigans that she doesn't remember. Everyone kept buying her drinks and shots everywhere, so that one drink in every bar turned into about 4 drinks in every bar. I looked around all day for something good to get her in Napoli, but didn't find anything. So I found a whole bunch of random crap to give her--including a rubber chicken.

The birthday girl. One of my random gifts was an "Emergency Mustache Kit" 

 Ashley (backstage tech) & Mike (Production Stage Manager for Blue Man & Legends)

I asked James (Blue Man sound tech) to take a picture of me and Uli and I got about 15 pictures like this of him and Al (Blue Man)

This was the picture we were trying for, and I found after about 20 shots of Al, James, the floor, my shoulder... everything but me & Uli (Blue Man captain)

All of these were in crew bar because we couldn't get too crazy in passenger areas and if we did, we shouldn't document it so we won't get in trouble. But this is basically what every night is like on the ship. We drink, we get silly, and we try not to get caught by security. We can't be out in passenger areas past 2am and we can never have a BAC over .08. It's really lame, but I've already seen people get kicked off because they were wandering the i-95 wasted at 6am. But anyway, it was a fun night and the following one Liz and I ended up at a cabin party with a couple of the Cirque performers and I didn't get to bed until 10am. It was rough, but watching the sun come up as we pulled into port was pretty awesome. 

Pompeii

Diane and I went to Pompeii a couple weeks ago, it was disgustingly hot out, but we had a good time. The city was much bigger than I expected, but we saw most of it (I think.) Except the frozen people, we couldn't find those. I was ok not seeing dead bodies preserved in the rock that killed them and wiped out the city. Diane was disappointed though.

From the top of the amphitheater, looking out over part of the city. This is the tiniest little portion, that whole place was massive.

 Amphitheater. The acoustics in that place are amazing! If you stand in the center of the stage and clap it's amazing how well you can hear it. They really knew how to build a theatre. Although, if we went back to that I know quite a few audio techs that would be out of a job, so I guess we'll keep the modern designs.

They even had a second stage right next to the big theatre! We didn't really go into this one, but I'm sure the acoustics are just a good.  

 Not sure what this was, but it was pretty :-) 

 We took a guess that this was their arena type venue for gladiator type events. They didn't have any signage, so we just made stories up about a lot of stuff. 

This was one of my favorites. It's amazing that this wall mural is still in such good condition after thousands of years and a volcano erupting all over the city. This was in a huge house which had paintings all over the walls. The colors were great, reds and yellows everywhere and this was tucked away at the back of the courtyard. 

This was the view as we left the ruins.

There were lots of pedestals and broken columns and such, so naturally Diane and I decided to be ridiculous statues on top of them. She posted more on Facebook, but this was the only one on my phone. I've got another where I'm falling over, it's pretty hilarious but I'm not posting it.