La Serenissima

Venice in times of COVID-19

Por Where's Herr Gruber?

16 de October de 2020

Hello again

This time from Greece. Where we’ve finally found the time to write an update about our time in Venice, Cinque Terre and Tuscany. Not so hard, since here in Greece the time seems to tick away slowly and all we seem to do is spend lazy days on the beach. And of course, eat Gyros. And those fluffy feta-spinach pies, yummy. Okay, and drink Hellas sunset beers...

Anyway, before you start drooling, back to Italy. Where we set off for Venice, not less drool- worthy, with it’s azulblue Grand Canal and impressive pallazo’s. And Aperol Spritz, tiramisu and huge pizza slices for €2,20. You get it, we like food.

Venezia

In 2009 nineteen-year-old me (Emy) lived in Venice for six months. Where I did my internship at Hotel Europa & Regina and gained some valuable insight in the hospitality industry. That, plus seven kilo’s. I wish my colleagues would have told me earlier that Italians don’t eat carbs twice a day. By then I was already enjoying the mensa's (staff canteen) vast supply of risotto’s and pasta’s with extra parmesan of course, twice daily, plus the mandatory daily Aperol Spritz... I came back home speaking Italian fluently, and chubby.

Back to 2020, Corona-times. The usually overfilled city is now quieter, one of the reasons we were curious to visit. We were in Venice for New Years a couple of years ago, so this time we just enjoyed walking around, and going to Emy’s favorite places. Not much has changed, although the city seemed less charming, more grungy and dirtier than we remembered. Not sure if this is because of the overtourism it has endured the last decade or the current corona-crisis, in which businesses were forced to close down because of a lack of that tourism?

Campo Santa Margharita was the same, although the cool kids don’t drink Aperol Spritz anymore. It’s Select Spritz now. We tried, but prefer the Aperol one, we’re over 30 years old now and not so cool anyway anymore, so it’s fine.

Ferrara, Modena and Parma

After a couple of days in Venice, we started to drive south and made a quick visit to Ferrara. Which was a really cool university city actually. We spend some hours there, found out that there was super fast public wifi and downloaded all of Netflix... Then we spend two nights in the middle of nowhere in the hills south of Bologna and we decided to visit Modena, which was pretty cool as well. And Parma.

Parma was not so cool, well the city was, but while we were enjoying Parma’s best Kebab someone broke into our van. You might be more shocked by reading that we ate a Kebab in Parma, the city of prosciutto and parmigiano, than by the fact that our stuff got stolen. We know, a kebab, bad. But mind you, we’ve been eating Italian food for a while and it was a Sunday. Sunday’s in Aachen were always Emy’s ‘Einbürgerungstag’. Like every other good German does on a Sunday, we ate a big döner kebab and watched Tatort. So yes, we ate a delicious kebab in Parma and we don’t feel bad about it. Punkt.

Back to the part where our van got broken into. We parked it somewhere super safe, with a lot of traffic and people passing by, even the police was shocked to hear it happened in this location. They broke the lock and grabbed some of Emy’s camera stuff, even going through our dirty laundry, but thank god no windows were smashed. Herr Gruber is very old and rare you know, and spare parts are very hard to come by. If a window would break, it would mean we wouldn’t have a home anymore. At least not until some spare windows would arrive from Russia or Japan. By some miracle we found two old similar looking Toyota locks at a seller in the Netherlands, he shipped them over to us in Italy and Simon did his magic engineering skills + installed a self-made alarm system, so we are good again, we hope.

In situations like these it’s best to just try to stay positive, be very happy that you have good travel insurance and think that people who steal stuff might need it more than you do. We have the luxury to travel for a year, so life is not bad at all.

That’s all for now! We thought we could write a little bit on Cinque Terre and Tuscany, but Emy keeps typing away and this is getting to long as it is, so that’s up for next time!