Pompeii at the Discovery Museum

One is not allowed to take pictures at this exhibit, but I found this picture on the USA Today Travel website and can attribute the article, though not necessarily the photo, to reporter Laura Bly.

This exhibit is definitely worth seeing and worth the admission price. I picked up a $5 off coupon somewhere and remembered to take it with me, but these same coupons are right out front as you enter the museum. You'd be pretty unobservant to pay full price, but then again who would expect a $5 off coupon to be at the entrance of an exhibit?

If you go, you will get to see amazing fresco paintings, delicate decorative carvings, and pottery like Jesus may have encountered, but the most amazing part is the molds of the bodies left behind on the second day of the eruption. Liquid plaster injection moldings were used to reproduce the space the decaying bodies left behind encased in a layer of ash. This particular dog was apparently a guard dog chained up and left behind as the owners evacuated.

Also, I was thoroughly entertained by a simulated time-elapse video as if a web cam had been in place in 79 AD in Pompeii.

Fire in the trash!

There was a cloud outside my window this morning. Turns out it wasn't a cloud, it was smoke from a fire below. A trash receptacle was spitting flames everywhere. Eventually three fire trucks made their way to the scene and focused their water hoses on it for about 45 minutes before it died down. In that time, at least three double-decker tour buses had driven by on their regular route. I wonder if the tourists had to pay extra for that excitement.