Broke in Bari

They told Alex before he left that they would pay him fifteen euros per hour to teach English to adults. It wasn’t a great amount of money but it was enough for him to live a decent kind of life in a city like Bari.

On his first day at the language center Giancarla, the manager, had laid out the paperwork. Giancarla told him they’d worked out the tax deductions and the health insurance and that the net would come to just under ten euros per hour.

Alex’s jaw clenched while Giancarla kept talking about the hourly rates.

‘I thought you said fifteen euros, net?’ said Alex.

‘Gross,’ Giancarla answered as she shifted in her chair. ‘We said there’d be taxes.’

He was certain the manager had said fifteen euros per hour when they’d had the interview online. ‘Oh, of course,’ Alex said as his skull felt like it was about to fragment into a thousand tiny pieces.

Alex had about two thousand euros left in his account. He’d blown through more than a thousand euros traveling through the country over the last three weeks. He started in Milan where he drank coffee in the morning overlooking the duomo and his afternoons on the streets taking pictures of anything that took his interest. After that he took the train to Verona and spent his days wandering around and his nights drinking beers in hidden backstreet bars. His final week of exploring took him to Venice where he decided to explore every little island in its peninsula. After exploring he had headed south as he stopped in Pescara for a night until he took the final train to the city of Bari at the very bottom of Italy.

In the office, Alex signed the contract and smiled despite the doubts.

He did the calculations as he walked home. They’d guaranteed him twenty hours of work a week so if he worked those hours he’d make about eight hundred euros per month. His house-share already cost him four-hundred euros per month. He’d planned to make closer to one-thousand two hundred euros. This four hundred euros per month differential was the difference between comfort and poverty. Four hundred euros was restaurants, holidays, clothes, or even just the little things like buying a cappuccino before work and not having to worry about if he had enough change in his pocket to buy a panini or a cornetto.

Alex headed down the old streets through Strada Filioli where they sold the good coffee and thought of how he’d be able to get by with almost no money. He’d left a stable and comfortably paid job in the UK to live the so-called Italian dream and now it felt like it had been ripped away from him before he’d even begun.

He’d been foolish enough to boast about it online. He told everyone that he had finally done it and he’d shared photos of his perfect new life eating gelato by the old basilica and drinking frothy lattes by the port overlooking the fishermen and he’d felt the love through the likes that streamed through online.

He couldn’t go back home now.

Alex went and bought a bottle of cheap wine from a shop on the corner of his street.

It was winter and even though the sun shined it was cold enough to need his coat and scarf. His rented room, a rustic and ancient ruin, built underground in an elaborate cave system was only heated for two hours in the evening, so when he got back it was still miserably cold. He locked the door behind him and headed straight for his bedroom and crawled under the duvet with his coat still on and began to take sips of wine straight from the bottle.

He played old songs on his phone and stared at the cracks in the ceiling as he tried to envision some kind of new life being destitute in Bari.

The next day he woke up just after sunrise with a sore head and with this senseless need to move. He climbed out of bed and splashed warm water over his face and then dressed as quickly as he could to keep himself from feeling the cold anymore than he had to. He layered up in an undershirt, a shirt, a jumper, a thick scarf and a long coat and headed out towards the pier.

He paced through the city with a fresh coffee in hand to try and stay warm. Bari was a city with three faces: its beautiful historic quarter by the sea that had stood for hundreds of years; the second face was mostly drab, uniform apartments that swelled around the old town without any character; and then the final uglier face of tower blocks and industrial sites that enveloped the edges of the city making you believe that the little parcel of beauty in the old town could never have existed at all.

For this reason, Alex liked to keep to the old town as much as possible. That was what he felt he needed; to be totally immersed in the history and to know that these streets had been walked on by people with far greater issues than him for over a thousand years. It gave him comfort to know that others had it worse than him and that maybe everything was just fine.

When he walked he still couldn’t stop himself from playing around with the numbers in his head.

He made a point of thinking about all of his daily costs: coffee and croissants in the morning for Є1.50, lunch was often just cheese and bread Є3.00, dinner he’d pick up a pizza or cook pasta – anywhere between 3.00 to 7.00 euros. Around seven euros per day at best but more likely at least ten euros a day when all things were considered. If he got wine – not the good wine, but the cheap wine from the local shop – then that was fourteen euros a day. He totaled it all up in head to be at least four hundred on food and drink and then four hundred on rent. These were just his bare essentials. He hadn’t even worked out how much a phone plan or small hidden, yet everyday costs would mount up.

In spite of his money trouble, he’d grown fond of Bari. It wasn’t Florence or Venice but it had its own charms. It was quieter and the people seemed more friendly and it wasn’t some overwhelming metropolis like Rome or Milan. It was a fair sized city that could be as beautiful as it could be ugly, but it was somewhere that felt like it could have been home.

The thought of going back to the UK after he had made such a big thing about how he followed his dream just killed him. He also now realised he could no longer stay and live some kind of meager existence. Maybe some people could live in poverty but it wasn’t what he signed up for.

That night it dawned on him that despite the dream, despite the false romanticism of Italy that he built up, the paradise of history and art and culture, he dreamed of making friends and speaking fluent italian in three months and discussing film and books late into night – it was all just a wild and crazy dream.

An idea occurred to him two days after the wage debacle and two days of drifting through the city in a daze. It was late at night and he was halfway drunk on bad wine, something he fell into a habit of ever since he realised he was financially on his knees, when he realised that there had to be a way out of all of this.

That night he sent off twenty different emails to different countries all across the world from Mexico, Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea, Poland, Germany, Thailand, Colombia. Because of the time zone difference some of them in Asia responded within a few hours.

One manager from Thailand with a private school called Royal English set up a skype interview in an hour’s time.

He downed a cup of coffee in the vain hope of reaching total sobriety in an instant, while he washed his face and put on a clean shirt and tried to clear his head and undo the work the booze had done.

The lady interviewed him from Thailand. She asked him seven or eight questions about his life and about his experience. She asked him how he would teach fruits to a group of eight years olds. She smiled and nodded as he gave his answer. He asked the wage and it was the same wage he was getting in Bari. But she told him Thailand was half the cost of Italy. After twenty minutes of talking, she stopped smiling and said, ‘today I need to hire three new teachers. Will you join my team?’

He paused, just for a moment, on the spot – to make it somehow work in poverty mode or fly to Asia, maybe live like a king and to not worry about the pennies again. ‘Yes, I think Thailand sounds like a wonderful choice,’

The lady smiled and told him that she would send the details in an email with the contract right away and then said goodbye.

Alex sighed and poured his last glass of wine from the bottle he had put under the table. He saw the email come through just as he sat down on the sofa. Twenty five hours of work a week for the equivalent of four hundred pounds a week. A good living for a country like Thailand.

He opened up his bank app: £1,556 left.

He looked up flights to Thailand: £568,

He let it resonate – the Italian dream in this freezing apartment with almost no money to live on. He really could have stayed and worked himself down to the knuckle to pull it off and make it work, but that just wasn’t in his nature.

Alex knew this wasn’t the end of the world. He’d lost most of his savings and his dream but he was still alive and there was still a touch of hope somewhere in his stomach that told him that maybe everything was going to be fine after all.