Bars in Bari

I had breakfast and bought my train ticket in Brindisi. I was hitchhiking last time I was here, so it’d be the first Italian train. On the back of the ticket there was the graph as showed above. These are Italian fossil trains. Water or nuclear makes it close to zero which is exactly what the planet needs to keep humans alive and happy, but even here trains (or bus) is the smarter move.

What I saw of Bari was so beautiful in a way that only Italy can, with old roman buildings mixed up by every century, including our present. The number of cars though … all the sound they made, and how Italians – both on foot or wheel – don’t really know red from green.

For restaurant I chose Al Raffaello after googling “vegan pizza”. You need to try that in Italy, I thought. Unfortunately, there was no vegan menu inside, so I went for the Gorgonzola dream above. As I had dinner, I joined the Couchsurfing group for Bari and the first message I get is “tonight, let’s meet at Al Raffaello” – and I was already there! What are the odds?

Me and the random travellers that showed up. From left to right: Benoit, who used to be a math teacher in France and is currently tending bees in Hamburg. He told me all about bees, and how they’re exterminated or not. He had also been to Sweden for a while giving his heart to an Erika, so every now and then he came with some nice words such as “helvetes jävla fan”. The guy on his right is Chetan, who comes from India but is working in London by doing research on systematic investing. We talked about how new pounds are produced, if they’re mostly done at the central bank or in private banks such as Barclays. Chetan will give me 100 euros after having read this article by Martin Wolf: https://www.ft.com/content/7f000b18-ca44-11e3-bb92-00144feabdc0 On the right we have Bertijn from the Netherlands, a super-intelligent expert on the Dutch language (and tons of other languages as well). He lives in Leiden and works in Utrecht, just like me once upon a time!

And then we met a group of English teachers, who had all been all over the world teaching English and drinking beer. Here is Chris, Simon and Dennis planning for how to let this Friday ruin their inner organs to each get an Italian wheelchair of the latest model. We talked about teaching, languages, the apocalyptic techno-dictatorship of China, folk music, heavy metal and so on, like a perfect night.

At the end of the night, the bar owner gave us a glass each of something that I don’t remember what it was but it had a great taste and was generally a bad idea. Good night!