Day 2: So long, and thanks for all the fish

Is this the real life

Another productive day at home. The sun came out to say hello. The shop lady across the road was spotted bravely unlocking the door, sporting stylish white gloves. Michael Jackson would be proud. Meanwhile, Kinder Easter eggs have arrived in grocery stores.

I often wonder why Italians are not diabetic. While Covid-19 is aggressively attacking the more frail demographic of the population, everyone else who is young and healthy is sitting on their sofas enjoying sugary comfort food. Maybe a lifetime of eating cookies is the answer. 

A lot of people also decided this was the perfect time to perform housework, an activity usually saved for Saturday morning. Maybe they’re fixing their houses to sell them and move to Malta once all of this is over. Maybe they just love a large audience. Either way, nothing beats the sound of drilling to bring a city back to life. Since it might be a while until I get to board another plane, it was a delight to be able to use my noise-cancelling headphones again.

A brisk walk during lunchtime was amusing. The flower men, resilient, still try to sell you three-hundred-year-old roses. The good news is that now, thanks to the Coronavirus, you can shout “ONE METRE” at them and they back off. There’s always a silver lining.

Impressively, the Navigli canals were filled with fish, floating about in post-apocalyptic panache. Nature is truly beating us at this game.

I grew up in Cyprus, a country known for its glorious, constant sunshine. As a teenager, I wasn’t really sure what to do with my curly mane and would opt for the safe (and disastrous) solution of hair straighteners. Beyond self-sabotaging my adolescent love life, this meant I looked like a total stranger on my identity card for roughly a decade. I also noticed a trend: every time I straightened my hair, it rained. A friend messaged me today to remind me of the fact: “Remember when you would straighten your hair and it would rain?” I replied, “Remember when I moved to Italy and it shut down?”

Song of the day:

Lunch: Black eyed beans (a nostalgia dish from Cyprus, which coincidentally also discovered its first cases of Covid-19 yesterday)