The morning started at 5 a.m., which is a perfectly reasonable hour to begin a holiday if your goal is to already feel exhausted before leaving the country. By 6, we were at the airport. I’d love to say security was smooth sailing, but apparently I looked especially suspicious today because I got to go through the random explosives test not once, but twice. By the second one I was genuinely starting to wonder whether I had unknowingly walked through gunpowder at some point. Thankfully, I was eventually declared non-explosive and allowed to continue.
Our first flight actually departed early, so we arrived in Stockholm ahead of schedule. We ate, lounged around for a while, and the second flight to Milan went by surprisingly quickly.
And then things got interesting. When I booked the rental car, I had listed Gerli as the driver. The small issue was that Gerli doesn’t have a credit card, which apparently left us with two options: either pay €157 for some kind of extraordinarily luxurious insurance package, presumably one that also protects the car from meteor strikes and emotional damage or make me the “main driver”. I did have my driving licence with me. Excellent. Except it was issued in my old surname. The surname I changed six and a half years ago.
So we now had a driving licence with my old name, an ID card with my current name, and a credit card with my current name. A beautifully coordinated collection of documents. Apparently, however, this arrangement was acceptable so €50 later, we had a car. We had booked an Opel Corsa or something similar and received… an MG3? Some Chinese car, anyway. It had wheels, it moved, and therefore met the basic requirements.
Then Gerli got to experience driving in Italy for the first time. Approximately one and a half minutes later, she had already concluded that absolutely nobody here had ever been anywhere near a driving school. One hour and a significant number of lost nerve cells later, we pulled into a Lidl car park and stocked up on food.
Our apartment is in Como Old Town, where cars are apparently regarded as unnecessary modern inconveniences and parking is more of a philosophical concept than an actual service. So we left the car in a parking structure and dragged our travelling circus — suitcases, bags, groceries and assorted belongings — about 850 metres through town to the apartment.
We ate and then went for a walk along the lake. The original plan was to take the funicular up the mountain and watch the sunset from above. Unfortunately, every single tourist in Como had apparently had exactly the same idea. The queue looked less like public transport and more like Celine Dion tickets were on sale. So we postponed that idea and decided to find sushi instead.
Google Maps took us to our chosen sushi place. Which turned out to be… a shelf inside a grocery store. Technically sushi, I suppose. We bought some food and went back home.
Later we ordered actual sushi through Deliveroo, and while waiting for it to arrive, I decided to prepare my sofa bed. This required moving the sofa slightly away from the wall. Simple. Except during this completely routine operation, I somehow managed to knock over the glass coffee table in such a spectacular way that the entire living room instantly became covered in glass. Everywhere. So. We no longer have a glass coffee table.
On the positive side, we managed to clean it up before the sushi arrived. And that turned out to be very good.
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