October 25th, 2012 Yesterday we took a bus back down to Naples and explored an old catholic church and an art museum. The journey there and back were the most exciting however. We were walking on the sidewalk when we saw, on the outer edge of the wide sidewalk, a pretty rooster pecking at a tomato. Now that's a first! I didn't even know they knew what a live chicken was here in the city! Nearby, there was a very small petstore with massive amounts of pet cages, food, excesories, etc tightly jammed near the doorway and inside the store. There wasn't much of a variety of pets in the store, but they did have a few here and there. In the front of the store, there were little tiny yellow and black turtles swimming around in a tank. They were so cute! I think it would be awesome to own at least 1 or 2 of these at least while we are living here, and if we cant take them back home, we can just set them free in the big pond behind the museum Ceramica Di Martina where lots of other turtles live! Anyways, further back into the pet store, there were little fluffy kittens and mice and rats and..... wait for it...... CHIPMUNKS! Yes, chipmunks! how awesome is that? Most of them were sleeping in their cage, but one of them would climb up a wall of the cage, do a backflip, and land on the other wall. It was so cool!

  the other wall. It was so cool! After we got to the church, we went inside to see the super tall, fancy decorated ceilings and lots of beautiful paintings. At the very back of the church, there was an alter on a huge stage with a covering of white and a vase of roses in front of it. Down the middle of the building, there were the seats, and on each both sides of those, were many large pillars holding the building up. There were little side rooms with pictures of Mary and Jesus and Nativity scenes with gold frames and decorations around them. Here and there there were candles fake and real that you could light up to signify that you were praying for someone. Donation boxes were by the alters and candles all over the place.

After having visited the church, we were on our way to the art museum! The museum started with a room with all sides, ceiling, floor and walls painted (actually the floor was tiled in colorfull decorations). The walls depicted creepy spider people in wierd positions and some other un-recognisable, colorfull shapes. My least favorite type of art.... :p It was really innapropiate too.... :P. anyways, the next room in the museum was the same. Upstairs, however, it was completely different. It was more of a modern-style type of art. The first room, was a giant anchor sitting infront of some bars. The next room made a wierd ecoey, humming noise when you entered. all around the walls were mirrors with light reflecting off of them. On the bars that held the mirrors out, were metal skulls without the mandable. The next room, had a piece of foggy glass on the wall with a jelly dude's face smushed up against it from the other side... It's kind of hard to explain but it's a good thing we took pictures! The next room had a huge black board with some form of math written all over it. This was Race's favorite. Then, we came into a room with a big black rectangle in the floor that turned out to be a hole in the floor, how crazy!

  After we had finished visiting that museum, we walked around in the allyways to see what we could see. There were hundreds of stores lined up everywhere, and some were just homeless people trying to see what they could sell. In many of the allyways, there were people creating these amazing houses and scenes with tree bark, moss, cloth, anything they could find and glueing them together to make a great, big scene. Some of them even had little lights built in and little waterfalls and streams running real water! They were the coolest thing... thank God for cameras!