Yes, there has been another huge gap since the last post, but there’s a good reason for it. After completing our vaccination cycles, Debo and I decided that the best course of action would be, naturally, to travel as much as possible.

Things worked out nicely because, by the beginning of July, the European Union rolled out the so-called “Digital Green Certificate”, which is essentially a QR code given to each person proving that they are suitable to travel within the continent. The certificate can show if you’ve been vaccinated, recently tested negative or have recovered from Covid; under one of these conditions, every EU country is allowing entrance without further restrictions.

Since our desire to travel has been accumulating for several months (our last trip was in October!), we ended up planning our longest trip so far. It started on June 26 and ended on July 23; in nearly a month, we visited eight countries, sixteen cities and a few more towns along the way.

I will write about each part of the trip over the upcoming weeks. It’ll take some time, because I have to go through the thousands(!) of photos I took, while getting back to work on the PhD assignments that I left on hold. It’s a lot of stuff, so bear with us! I’ll mainly write about the logistics about visiting a place, the places that we enjoyed seeing, and any potential difficulties a visitor might have; Debo in the meantime will post about the foods and cultures of each place.

For now, I’ll list the itinerary we followed, so everyone can have an idea of where we’ve been:

Country	Place	Dates
Italia (Italy)	Cinque Terre	26/06 - 29/06
Italia (Italy)	Genova (Genoa)	29/06 - 01/07
Italia (Italy)	Torino (Turin)	01/07 - 03/07
France	Nice	03/07 - 06/07
France	Cannes	04/07
Monaco	Monaco	05/07
Polska (Poland)	Warszawa (Warsaw)	06/07 - 08/07
Polska (Poland)	Kraków	08/07 - 10/07
Polska (Poland)	Oświęcim (Auschwitz)	09/07
Polska (Poland)	Wrocław	10/07 - 11/07
Polska (Poland)	Poznań	11/07 - 12/07
Polska (Poland)	Gdańsk	12/07 - 13/07
Polska (Poland)	Warszawa (Warsaw)	13/07 - 14/07
Lietuva (Lithuania)	Vilnius	14/07 - 16/07
Lietuva (Lithuania)	Trakai	15/07
Latvija (Latvia)	Rīga (Riga)	16/07 - 18/07
Latvija (Latvia)	Cēsis (Cesis)	17/07
Suomi (Finland)	Helsingfors (Helsinki)	18/07 - 21/07
Suomi (Finland)	Turku	20/07
Eesti (Estonia)	Tallinn	21/07 - 23/07

Map of the places we went.

Yes, it was a lot! To get to all these places, we literally took “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”, and there’s also a boat in the mix!

The next post will be about Cinque Terre, giving details about each of the towns in that area. As posts get published, I’ll link to them in the table above, so this post can serve as an index. See you soon!