20/02/2020
A few impressions of Bari:
- to know Italian is not enough, local people speak an incomprehensible dialect;
- the old town looks very much like Naples;
- also here, people have the habit to hang all their clothes in the street;
- seafood is amazing, sweets and gelato are better in Naples;
- the experience of walking alone felt like living in a Hollywood movie: even elder men were whistling to me in the street, scooters ringing their clacsons, cars stopping to let me cross over where I should not cross over; somebody always wanted to talk in the coffee bar even if they knew only two words in English. Because of my foreign looks, nobody expected me to speak Italian. In general, I find that stereotype about whistling flirting Italian men highly exaggerated and not valid. I think that any local girl in Milan or Rome would find it offensive nowadays. But Bari is still very close to the movies. It was fun for one day 🙂
- Bari’s airport has two electric plugs in the whole aiport (and a hundred people in panic how to charge their phones);
- on most traffic lights, the green light never turns on. You see red, yellow and then nothing. You are supposed to drive not when green light is on, but when red is NOT on (or when a car behind you starts hooting at you)
- A lady at the airport with a perfect pronunciation knew to say “hello” and “euros” in English (all the rest including numbers was in Italian). I assume that in her curriculum it was stated as “intermediate English”😂 I did not need it, but I think that it is quite challenging for English speakers in Bari. And I did not notice local people to use many gestures.
- people are... Mediterranean. I don’t know how better to describe that type of super relaxed, easy going, fun type of human race 🙂 I asked one lady for the address, she shut her boutique shop to walk me 100 meters. Some guys in the bar were telling me that to experience Sicily is not enough to travel around for a week, but I have to stay there for a few months at least. His friend asked “but when to work then?”. “In the other life”, he responded.
Cheers to this life and allegria which Mediterraneans bring. 🙂
@ Bari, Italy
