🗁Added 62 photos to album EU transit, Feb 2019.
The night ferry from Patras to Bari was really nice. It was very empty. I had deck passage only, but an entire segment of seats to myself. There were plenty of places to sleep. Not only that, but there was free wifi and power outlets all over. Probably the most well-resourced ferry journey I've been on thus far. I ate at the ferry canteen, which was mediocre, but there were a bare minimum vegan things. Vegetables and chips and salad. The staff were very friendly, because they were Greek of course.
Naturally it all went downhill upon arrival in Italy :) The handful of foot passengers had to pass our bags through security, and the Italian border guards squinted at my passport for ages. Eventually they asked "tourism?" and I said si and they let me go, but they held onto it and discussed it for way longer than they should've.
I had a day and a night in Bari. When I arrived it was raining; I chilled out in a vegan restaurant for most of the day, then went to my hostel in which I was literally the only guest. Good night's sleep.
The next day was sunny; I got up early to walk around the water front and old town, grabbed more food from the vegan restaurant, and caught a Flixbus across the width of Italy to Rome.
I anticipated the most traumatising part of the journey to be changing from Rome Tiburtina bus station to Rome Termini train station, and built in a lot of buffer for the ostensibly 15 minute metro ride. It was fine, actually, not too busy and though the ticket I just bought failed to let me through a barrier the station staff sullenly opened it for me without question. I bought an onward train ticket to Civitavecchia from Rome, then almost missed it because the station is fucking huge and the platform was as far away from me as it could possibly have been. The train was pretty busy. I arrived at sunset, and the sky over Civitavecchia was gloriously on fire.
The one vegan restaurant in Civitavecchia I planned to stop by was inexplicably closed (no surprise really, this is a hallmark of my experiences in Italy) so I skipped dinner and went straight to the port. Civitavecchia is confusing to navigate as there's a big ol' wall in between the old town and sea front, and all the stairs and arches that let you cut through it were locked up when I got there. So I used up all my buffer time, then discovered access to the port is not possible for pedestrians anyway; but there's a free shuttle bus. I went through another security line, behind a coachload of kids, and eventually boarded the ferry.
This trip was over 20 hours, so I'd splashed out and booked a shared 4-bed cabin. I was the only one in it, which I kind of expected. Though I would have been able to find a place to sleep with deck passage, the ferry was pretty busy with loud Italians, so I'm glad I didn't.
I spent the journey reading the Rebooting Web of Trust topic papers and eating mediocre very overpriced ferry canteen food, and sometimes sitting out in the sun on deck. I arrived in Barcelona a couple of hours early.
