Genoa, Italy
Posted on July 12, 2023 • 6 minutes • 1147 words
This time I swore after a big day we were going to have a chill one. Morning at a pirate ship, lunch at home and maybe some afternoon wandering around. It did not go as planned.
After breakfast at home of yogurt and bananas we were off to the pirate ship. On the way we checked out the deterioration of some columns and saw talked about the order of how part of it was patched. I’m an structural engineer, we always check this stuff out!
Continuing on, this pirate ship, ‘Neptune’, was in a movie in the 80s, but I have yet to find someone who has seen it…Roman Polanski’s ‘Pirates’. A quick 12 minute walk (less for travelers without a 2yo) and we were there*. It was kind of amazing!
It looked so real and even though most props like the cannons and anchor were made out of fiberglass, it was a fully functional ship that could sail.
We peaked our heads in all the nooks and crannies and went up and down and up and down to all the decks that were accessible.
So many questions from the kids…are these real cannons? No. How did them make the cannons blast in the movie? No idea, ask your dad. Can we shoot one? Not real.
Made our best pirate faces and head off. 100% recommend doing this, but 15 minutes and you were done.
I still haven’t seen the movie, but we watched the trailer 4x, so I feel I’ve seen half of it.
We wandered around the port area and decided to do a petite train tour through the city for 45min…there was begging and I didn’t have it in me to fight it. Kind of boring, but the kids loved it and as mentioned before…it’s not all about me.
We had passed an adorable food truck selling pesto pasta and we headed back there for lunch.
Grabbed a couple and sat on a curb devouring it.
So good and in my opinion, anything from a food truck just tastes 20% better than from a store.
It already felt like we had done enough and we were hot, but the kids refused to go back to the Airbnb. They insisted no one was tired and wanted to see more. We were right at the aquarium so we popped in to see Dan at the conference and then wandered through the rest of the aquarium for hours. And I mean hours! The sawfish was a huge hit (I had never seen one before!) as were the seahorses that had their tales hooked on a rope in the water so they didn’t float away.
As we were walking out, we stopped by the big shark/sawfish/manta ray tank and had a blast sitting behind the kids and calling their names every they were looking the other way from a shark coming and watching them jump EVERY time. Just a picture as I don’t know how to add videos yet. :)
Finally, we walked back to the Airbnb. Some down time and then we had the largest ball of burrata ever with tomatoes for dinner. So easy and so yummy. Rounded it off with a cut up cucumber and felt pretty happy with our healthy Italian dinner.
The next day was just as hot, did I mention we melted the day before?, and I decided to make it an easy day and go to the kids’ museum. It was really well done with a room dedicated to each of our senses. In the hearing room they had a sound proof room (currently missing the door) where you could test the decibels of your scream. Ben set the daily record.
The olfactory room had a giant nose where you could put these balls, that you smelled first and tried to guess the scent, in it and it would tell you the scent. Kinda cool actually.
In the touch room we had way too much fun making forms of out bodies and checking them out.
And there construction play area in the back. I sat and watched for 2hrs! They had so much fun constantly loading foam bricks in the wheel barrows, to the crane and hauling them up.
From my angle I could only see the bricks going up (not being thrown off the back that I figured out from walking around) and it felt like some weird clowns getting out of a small car scenario. Bricks up for hours, but never coming down. I had to bribe them with gelato to finally leave.
Back at the apartment. Lots of chill time and even though the kids were a big off, Dan and I pushed for a nice dinner at a place recommended to us by his student. We barely cobbled together emotions, but I offered to take kids exploring the streets and it turned into 45 minutes of searching for the Chamber of Secrets.
Dan is reading the Harry Potter books the 2nd time through with the kids and being in such an old place, with so many side alleyways, bared windows, cracks in the streets that you can see through have their imagination going wild. It’s constant…that looks like Diagon Alley, could that be Tom Riddle’s house?, Look! Harry’s wand.
Serious discussion on which one was the entrance to the Chamber of Secretes, but we narrowed it down to 3 and then to one. Here is it, the Chamber of Secrets in Genoa!
Stumbled upon a very old church that was missing a roof and with dinosaurs in it, because why not? Talked more about old structures and headed towards the restaurant.
We met up with Dan for dinner and it was amazing.
Kids ate anchovies and scallops and the pesto pasta was in giant sheets of pasta (think 4in x 12in) folded over each other.
We needed 3 bowls of bread, but they ate the food and the bread, mainly the focaccia, was very good. Kids were losing it and it was apparent they needed to get to bed soon. Kids crashed hard and Dan and I packed up to be ready for our 7:45am train.
I really wasn’t expecting to like Genoa as much as I did. We were in a great location and it was so fun walking in any direction and winding through alleys where you could touch both sides of the buildings, yet somehow never get lost. Kids made it fun with their imagination and always turning walks into adventures.
*Our Airbnb was in a great location, even though it was actually a terrible place. I won’t go into the terrible-ness of it now, but the one redeeming quality was the location. We were an 8 min walk to the aquarium (where Dan’s conference was) and right on a plaza. We could see a gelato shop from our window.