Welcome to our first conversation in this little digital Café! Grab your cup of coffee, tea or milk (plant-based included) and let's have a chat about my recent post-confinement trip.

So, ever since I finished college and started working (it sounds like a lot of time and that I'm old but it was literally not even two years ago), I decided that I would do a trip to another country every year and another one in my country. This way I could know my birth country, which is freaking beautiful by the way, and know the rest of the world as well.

Of course, I had to start in Europe because it is what I can afford (yep, ain't no rich girl on this side of the keyboard). Yes, I know you can go to the other side of the world on a budget but, since I haven't seen what near me yet, why not start here?

Furthermore, I have a regular job that doesn't let me go on vacation whenever I want and I'm a family girl, so I need a week or two with my parents every year...there's not much left to go on crazy long trips.

So, me and my boyfriend went to Barcelona, we went to Paris and this year we were going to lose our minds and go on a 10 day trip to Northern Italy!!

I was so excited that I even did a deep research to plan everything perfectly and...the Covid-19 went to Italy, and then Spain, and then everywhere including Portugal, so "Goodbye, my beloved Italy trip that never happened!".

However, I did have my leave days already booked at my job and, by that time, the quarantine was over and we could carefully travel around the country. Besides that, now is the time to help locals and that's what we decided to do: pack our bags and go somewhere in Portugal. The choice was Aveiro!

You might know this city as the Portuguese Venice as it has a canal/little river (I have no idea how to call it in English but it is called Ria in Portuguese...I think canal is a good one). So yeah, we didn't go to the original one but we ended up going to a Venice anyway!

The first thing we did was to book a place to stay, since we didn't need a plane ticket (we drove there, as it was a two hour drive from my place).

We chose a perfect little spot on the city center called Urban Suites which costed us 122€ for two nights (breakfast included), but there are rooms from around 43€/night. I have to say that I loved this place!

It had this cute area outside where you could have breakfast or just chill then we went inside and our room was so cute. It wasn't super big but it was just enough, it had a bathroom with a small bathtub, then an entry hall with a couch, a huge window and a place to hang your clothes on and, finally, there were this cute little stairs that would take us to our bedroom. I didn't take pictures of the room (shame on me, I know) but go check the photos on the link above, you'll love it!

Besides being beautiful itself, the room was awesome for some great pictures (yep, instagramable, what a plus!) as you can see!

So, moving on to what matters: how does it work in these post-Covid-19 times?

First, everyone wears a mask, obviously, and you also have to wear one when you're around other people. You can only take them off when you are eating and inside your room, which by the way has hand sanitizer by the door and the cleaning is done every mourning as usual.

The Check-In is doesn't involve any contact with anyone, it's like self service. There is a machine at the entrance where you put your reservation number or your name, you present your IDs and it gives you the key and a little ticket with useful information. After that, the host came to meet us at the entrance just to lead the way to our room. Then, the checkout is just leaving the key in a little mail box they have by the door.

Now the breakfast! We were really curious about it because we booked this stay with breakfast, which was buffet as in the website, and we didn't know how it would be done with the social distancing thing. This being said, as we entered the room, we found a paper box sitting there in the entrance table, we open it and...voilá! Our breakfast for the next day!

So the only thing we needed was to buy fresh bread from a bakery on the other side of the road, which I kind of enjoyed, and then we could go have our breakfast in the outdoor area of the place.

Last but not least, I think it would be useful to mention the parking in Aveiro. Most of it is paid, in the very center of the city, but you will find these big outdoor free parkings really close so if you're driving to Aveiro (which is useful if you want to go to Costa Nova, the beaches and Águeda which are 10/20 minutes rides from the center) you should be ok with these parkings. One of them is right behind the Urban Suites, it is called Nossa Sra Aflitos.

Well, I hope you find this post useful and if you're considering visiting Aveiro, go ahead because you won't regret it! This post was more focused on our stay and how it works with the social distancing measures but I will be posting more about this trip in next posts.

See you on the next coffee cup!

XO,

Bárbara!