Downtown downtown I'm not here not anymore I've gone away don't call me don't write I'm in love with your daughter I want to have her baby I'm in love with your daughter so can I please

Lyrics: somedays / regina spektor

They'll name a city after us and later say it's all our fault then they'll give us a talking to then they'll give us a talking to

we got up a little late the next day and then went around edinburgh got something to eat one of my friends felt a little ill so she went back to the hotel by herself and we went on to the castle but we didn't fancy paying the £16 entrance fee so we took some pictures and then left

we went into this optical illusions museum and we didn't mind paying £10.95 for the entrance fee haha, we had this show thing at first where they showed you the camera obscura in the roof which was interesting but the rest of the musuem was better they had a maze of mirrors which was cool and loads of like little tricky things it was fun

we also went in some shops on the high street and bought some souvenirs then we went back to the hotel to kill some time before the ghost tour one of us suggested we went to nandos so we did the service was very quick so we went for a drink in frankensteins before heading over to the meeting point for the ghost tour

the ghost tour only lasted an hour but it was pretty good the first bit was more like a history tour which was interesting but then we went into the vaults which was creepy they were so dark and the floor was so uneven and then the guide started to tell the stories about the ghosts in the vaults but overall it was quite good the guide was quite fun :)

back at the hotel we finished off the alcohol we bought the other day and then went to bed..the next day we just went home haha there wasn't much interesting about the journey home it was more boring than the journey there haha but i guess we were just fed up of each other by then

Lyrics: us / regina spektor

Now I'm relieved to hear that you've been to some far out places it's hard to carry on when you feel all alone now I've swung back down again it's worse than it was before if I hadn't seen such riches I could live with being poor

had a good bank holiday weekend :) went out shopping on saturday spent nearly all of my last pay cheque then that night i went out w/ my friends and got pleasantly drunk and then i had a lazy day on sunday, a family barbeque last night and today we went to this village that had roman ruins and a museum and we had lunch in this lovely village pub

ahhhh it's been nice and i'm not in college now so yeah i'm going to be writing like crazyyy

Lyrics: sit down / james

You move slow like daytime drama and I'm boring like his songs so while I'm taking you for granted we'll be humming along well cross my heart and hope to I'm lying just to keep you here so reckless so so thoughtless so careless I could care less

we watched a really interesting documentary in english literature today we were learning about the plays in context so we looked at how the morality play could be applied to 'dr faustus' as it was a common genre of the time, and then the teacher put on a documentary

it was about equivocation and king james and shakespeare and the gunpowder plot and treason and execution and it was so fascinating

it's an area of history i enjoy and wish i knew more about tbh shakespeare has a special place in my heart anyway so i'm pretty much interested in anything to do with him

Lyrics: slow dance on the inside / taking back sunday

Your vision is right my vision is wrong I'm sorry for smudging the air with my song

i've decided to forget about writing notes for the moment and i'm instead reading through the books again until it actually makes sense

it's helping a little, i understand some of it more like motives and what people actually did..like, i knew that sejanus was a bastard but i didn't know why until i read the sections on him properly

that said tacitus is easily one of the driest things i've ever read but is still more exciting than frankenstein which is always a good thing

Lyrics: a singer must die / leonard cohen

I'm on the edge of glory and I'm hanging on a moment with you I'm on the edge with you

day 3 started like the one before it only i actually got up a little earlier because M wanted to use the shower first

i didn't eat anything for breakfast because i couldn't face it and i didn't see the point when i wouln't enjoy it, i had some tea again but it just made me feel a little ill, which wasn't good

then we drove to pompeii which was further away from the hotel than the other places..it was near the pizza place we went on the first day and it was surprising how busy pompeii was i don't know what else i expected but there were groups of tourists everywhere and it was a really lovely day..at first walking through to it it didn't look like a set of ruins it looked like a park or something, it was really bizarre

plus no one else thought we were english they seemed to think we were american we spent the time walking round pompeii being yelled at by french/italian/spanish people who were calling us americans and quoting american tv shows at us, that was weird because we didn't think we actually LOOKED amercian but apparently we did

but yeah, back to pompeii, it was really fascinating walking around it and it was actually quite beautiful the ruins were amazing to look at, probably not as well-preserved as herculaneum but it didn't matter because they were good enough, i found out some really interesting things i didn't know before and i could have walked around it for longer than we did

pompeii ruins

seeing the body casts was horrible though, it was sickening because you could see the pain on their faces and it made me feel ill, it was kind of too morbid for my liking..plus one of the casts was of a pregnant woman which upset me quite a bit

the other thing that upset me was the brothel, they have frescos on the walls of women and men doing various sexual acts and everyone walks through the brothel (seriously it was like the most well-preserved section) and giggles at these frescos and takes pictures and i didn't find it funny, i was thinking like, "prostitutes then were actually slaves, they were women forced to do this, it was practically rape, and that's quite sad really" i mean i know it wasn't all involuntary but most of the women were slaves, taken from other countries and different lives and it just bothered me a little bit because obviously people now find those pictures amusing and put them on fridge magnets and post cards and they don't think about it

we had lunch in pompeii, i couldn't have stomached the sandwiches they gave us so i bought my own from the restaurant and it was really nice, it was mozzarella and prosciutto ham and it was seriously the best thing i'd eaten since arriving in italy

after pompeii we went to solfatarra which was another volcano but it was like a flat plain, there is no lava in it just hot steam and it 'erupts' when there's earthquakes i did NOT like being in an active volcano with steam coming out of it but everyone else was more bothered by the smell, basically it also releases sulphur which naturally stinks of rotten eggs, a lot of people (mainly girls) were gagging and one girl was being sick

it did smell bad but i was, like i said, more concerned about the fact the ground could crack and steam would come out of it i know it wasn't logical because they wouldn't even let us near the place if there was a danger of that happening but a girl's allowed to worry

solfatarra

instead of going straight back to the hotel we headed into sorrento afterwards and i bought some last minute souvenirs but i broke something in one shop and had to buy it which was awkward, then we got lost..we managed to find the meeting point though and then we just had to wait for everyone so we could get the train

we were like yelled at by this man who said 'the english are shit' at us and that was a bit awkward because we couldn't speak italian

then we were back at the hotel. dinner was terrible again, i nearly didn't even get served, but then we just went back up to our room like the other nights to play card games this time my friends T and H joined us and again it was just a really nice, fun night..

until they all had to leave and W and C went out on the balcony again but then the manager of the hotel was out on the street screaming at us to go to bed and get off the balconies and he started going into people's rooms so we just gave in and went to bed

Lyrics: the edge of glory / lady gaga

It happened on the day you put your hand in mine you went up to my head just like a glass of wine girl you spark my attention like a firefly and make me happy to be alive

day two of pompeii i set my alarm for half six and then fell back asleep because i was still really tired, but i was still the first up and ready in my room and i was one of the only ones properly dressed in time for breakfast

breakfast was just as bad as dinner it was a buffet sort of thing but the choice was very limited, their tea was horrible it tasted like just water and sugar and i'm such a big tea drinker but i really struggled with it

the first place that we went was herculaneum, which is kind of like pompeii; basically it was destroyed in the same volcanic eruption that destroyed pompeii but if i'm remembering rightly it was for different things, pompeii was covered in ash and herculaneum was covered in lava

but herculaneum was fascinating, it was really well preserved and looked after..it was really odd walking through these houses and baths and knowing that thousands of years ago people walked in the same places you did, people lived in these houses and slept in the beds we were taking photographs of

and then thinking along the lines of so many people died here, that was kind of spooky and so weird..

herculaneum

then we drove to vesuvius.

right, climbing vesuvius was easily one of the hardest things that i've done in my entire life i am really not fit in the slightest, my idea of exercise is getting a packet of crisps out of the kitchen, and vesuvius (being a volcano and everything) is really steep and the surface is difficult, it's lots of little pebbles and you take one step and it slides backwards again

so i really, really, really struggled climbing vesuvius. i didn't even want to do it because i wasn't a geography student and the fact i was on the side of an active volcano really freaked me out, plus everyone else apart from me and H went storming off like super athletes and i felt a bit down about it tbh but that's life i suppose

we reached the top and had this talk with this man and he walked us around the top of the crater telling us about how the volcano works and the echo and how we can see pompeii from the top and so on, then we had to walk down and it was better than walking up but it was more dangerous because we kept on slipping

plus vesuvius was the part where it really hit us how careful you have to be there when it comes to souvenirs and stuff every single souvenir stall on vesuvius promises that its products are handmade by the owner, genuine lava etc etc and then you realise that each stall sells the exact same thing and so does a shop on the other side of naples

the view from somewhere up vesuvius

once we got back down, we went straight back to the hotel..we had like a half hour break and then V was sick and then the teachers announced we could go to the beach if we wanted but because V was sick and me and M didn't feel like it some of us stayed back at the hotel and sat in our room listening to music and chatting

then they all came back and we started playing card games and stuff but then we had dinner which was vile and then the teachers said that we could go out to the bars in town if we wanted and have something to drink

i chose not to go and stay with my friends T H and S and that was pretty nice, we sat in their room and read this book on naples and the mafia and listened to music and ate junk food..

when they all came back i went to my room again thinking i could go to sleep but that wasn't to be, instead W and C came in again to speak to M and some other lads came in too, we didn't play card games though..when they were sent to their own rooms W and C sneaked back in because their room was next to ours and we had joining balconies. so then we carried on talking for a bit longer and we had a laugh

when they had to go back the other lad in their room had locked them out so they had to go and get the room key of the other boy they were staying with who was getting more and more drunk in one of the other rooms, so that's how we left them

V went straight to sleep after that but M and I stayed up a bit longer talking about other people on the trip, but then we realised that V was asleep so we gave in and went to sleep too

Lyrics: firefly / jimmy needham

Come take a walk on the wild side let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain you like your girls insane

i've got like this crush thingy on drusus from roman history

i don't know why because by all accounts most romans were dicks and he's probably no exception haha

Lyrics: born to die / lana del rey

I can't tell you how to live your life but I know how to live mine

Everyone on my Facebook friends list is planning holidays to malia and magaluf this year and me and my friends are going to Edinburgh I suppose in some ways that is abroad haha

But seriously I wouldn't go to those places they really don't appeal to me at all... I'd rather go somewhere with a load of history about it, history is my life in a lot of ways, I mean granted Knossos isn't far from malia but would I want to stay in malia itself? No. No, I wouldn't...

In better news, great British Bake off and pizza for tea, can't complain

Lyrics: boy in a rock and roll band / the pierces