Happy birthday to me!

Today it was my birthday and I could have not celebrated it in a better way. 

During our follow-up visit last friday, my son's doctor (the one about whose office I was finally able to write about in this post) strongly recommended us to go to the beach and make him breath some fresh air. Since it has not been raining much in the past three months, pollution levels in Milan are sky-high and the doctor discouraged us from taking my son outside in these conditions. My parents were kind enough to offer us a beach vacation as Christmas present, so last Monday we made our reservation. After much back and forth about where to go, we decided to go back to one of our favourite places, Sestri Levante, which is located in Liguria in between Portofino and the Cinque Terre. My grandmother was half Ligurian and my grandparents owned an apartment in nearby Chiavari, so that I spent most of my childhood in the area during the winter and summer holidays. Chiavari, however, is a big town with no beach, so that in recent years we had started coming to the small town of Sestri Levante, where everything is accessible on foot and there is an incredible atmosphere of old Italian villages. This time, we would have liked to perhaps go on vacation to a different place, and we had explored options in Forte dei Marmi, Sanremo, and even Cannes. In the end, though, we decided to choose a well-known, nearby place, where we knew what to do and to expect. After all, the purpose of this trip is first and foremost to make sure that my son recovers well.

We arrived in Sestri Levante last night, and this is the view we woke up to this morning. We are staying at an amazing hotel, the Vis-a-Vis, which is located on top of the hill dividing two bays: Silence Bay (Baia del Silenzio, in Italian) and the Bay of Fairy Tales (Baia delle Favole, in Italian). It is low-season, so we are among the few hotel guests. This means we get pampered a lot :-)

Because the sea was a bit agitated, the highlight of our day was running away from the waves in Silence Bay. It was the first in the past ten days that my son was able to go outside, and it was priceless.