Vijay and Shefali's TAtW

So after the ferry from Montenegro, we took a bus to Naples, Italy. Naples is known as the birthplace of a few of everybody’s favorite things – real mozzarella, real espresso and real pizza. Gelato may be somewhere in there too, I don’t know. But there’s something that Naples is, inexplicably, not well known for: being an absolute shithole. Allow me to explain how the city of Naples assaults no less than four of your five senses: There has been a garbage crisis in the city since 2009. You can’t tell this from the pictures, and in hindsight I regret neglecting to document the absolute filth in which the entire city is practically swimming. It’s like someone turned a garbage dump inside out. And you hear it constantly – someone’s always knocking some literal pile of crap over or catching a piece of refuse under their heel. And even if you managed to clear bag after bag of trash you’d still be ankle deep in detritus and flotsam, everything from random litter to half-consumed food to discarded prophylactics. And if you happened to get past that, you’d still have to scrub random stains and graffiti off everything. And by “random stains” I mean a wide array of materials that clearly originated inside a sickly animal before going all Jackson Pollack on the sidewalks and facades of downtown Naples. Speaking of biological waste, there’s a smell that pervades practically every street. This isn’t just the normal stank urine or hobo smell that you encounter somewhere in every major city – this is an indefensible olfactory assault on the verge of asymmetric warfare. It’s like someone pissed on a bunch of rotting corpses of people who had died of food poisoning while shitting themselves to death. In July. During a record breaking heatwave. And if you aren’t careful, you’ll taste it in the back of your throat as you inhale deeply after holding your breath for too long so as not to smell it in the first place. So in short, Naples is practically a third-world country. The only thing missing is livestock roaming freely through the streets. The food was pretty good but overpriced. Truth be told though, it doesn’t matter how good some place’s food is if it’s served next to a maggot-ridden dumpster. But maybe I’m just being picky.

Vijay