Ciao funky people.

Today we are hitting the road and moving to yet another stop on our journey through Italy. Except for this time we don’t actually know where we are going.

Let me explain what’s going on - we are heading from Florence (where we woke up this morning) to Rome, but we are making a random 3-day stop along the way.

In fact, we’ll be pulling the name of our next stop out of a hat once we get to the Florence train station. 🙂

Why are we doing this? Well to entertain the internet, of course! We are out to discover if everywhere in Italy is as charming and beautiful as the more popular stops! But also because we're craving some adventure and spontaneity in our lives.

We'll see how it goes. We literally have nothing planned for the next 3 days. And at this very moment we don't even have a place to rest our weary heads tonight.

Anyways, let’s talk about this past week in Italy's coolest city 😀

Bologna lives up to the hype!

Remember last week when I claimed Bologna to be my favorite city in Italy without ever setting foot inside of it!? Well, I’m happy to report that Bologna lived up to my self-created hype. It actually even exceeded my unrealistic expectations 🙌

We spent 5 days here and filmed a little foodie video. That seemed like a good idea considering that Bologna is referred to by some as the food capital of Italy! And that's clearly a bold statement in this country.

As it turns out, they are obsessed with food in Bologna - it's everywhere you look! There are little shops selling fish and fresh vegetables, charcuterie shops with only the best of the best, stores selling handmade pastas, trattorias, osterias, restaurants, cool little bars, and our favorite: places that have only one thing on the menu!!!!

That's when you know they're serious.

We enjoyed the original recipe for tagliatelle al ragu (aka Bolognese sauce) and lasagna. They were both out of this world! But we also tried super tasty mortadella sandwiches, fried gnocchis, tortellinis, tortellonis, wine, salamis, cheese, piadine, pizzas, Aperol Spritz, wine (yes, again).

There was so much ridiculously good food! Maybe it was too much for my body to handle, because I ended up getting sick 😷 (more on that below).

If this doesn't convince you to add Bologna to your Italy itinerary, I don't know what will. Just do it, you won't regret it.

We published an Italy video! 🇮🇹

I know some of you (maybe none of you) are wondering, ‘what the heck, they skipped posting videos about Bosnia & Herzegovina!?!’ Well, yea - we did sort of jump ahead.

But if we have learned anything from over two years of posting videos on YouTube, it's that nobody really cares 😂

We are really excited to post Italy videos before the holidays and try some new things. We thought these videos had a better chance of performing better, and since we're about to enter the holiday season in the US, YouTube Ad Revenue is at its highest!

So, please watch our video until the end if you can 🙏🏼 This really helps us reach more people on YT.

Here’s our video from Verona!​

Announcing our first paid product everrrrrr!!!

Guys, this is HUGE news for us (and hopefully for you too!)

We've been working behind the scenes on these products for weeks now and forced ourselves to have them ready at the same time we release our Italy videos... so yeah, we haven't slept much 😂

The reason we decided to speed things up with this, is that we basically need to dive into other forms of income besides for YouTube and website ad revenue, and also, since we reached 1,000 newsletter subs 2 months ago (thank you 🤩), we now have to start paying for this platform... and it's $490 a year LOL (and it will continue to be more expensive as our little friends of the world family grows)... so, we do need to start exploring other forms of income.

But this is not just to make money honestly. We thought long and hard about which type of product we wanted to create. So we figured that a really detailed PDF for $3 would be accessible to anyone visiting Verona.

Ultimately, our goal will always be to encourage you to see the world, help you feel more confident when heading out there into the unknown and spread the word about responsible traveling. And we truly hope to accomplish that with these travel guides.

This is just the beginning ⭐️

​You can get the premium version of the Verona PDF here.​

It costs $2.97, but we set it up as a 'pay what you want' model (with a minimum price of $2.97).

But wait...

We also have a free version of the PDF! And because you guys are already 'friends of the world', of course you have access to it. We want everyone who needs the most basic Verona info to have access to it!

​Verona Free PDF.pdf​

Anyways... we're proud of ourselves for finally doing this! If we're being completely honest, it's always terrifying to try something new. The possibility of failing is always scary, and of course there's a chance that absolutely no one has an interest in these products we're working so hard to create. But we've learned over the past 2 years as full time travelers and video makers, that by trying you're already winning and even if you fail, you always learn something. The only way you lose, is when you give up. Read that again 💞

​Check out this short reel to understand how we feel almost every day of our lives... (we see you dream chaser, hang in there!)

And we would be really grateful for any feedback on either PDF. Is it too much info? Too little? Disorganized? Missing info? Absolutely freaking perfect???

Let us know :)

Three days in beautiful Florence!

We had a rough welcome to Florence.

We arrived to our $95/night Airbnb, which was a really sad looking little room outside of the center. When we booked this place, it said it had a private bathroom, but when we arrived, they told us that the bathroom was shared with 2 other rooms.

We can compromise A LOT of things when traveling, but a private bathroom is not one of them. So after a long and stressful afternoon talking to Airbnb, they finally gave us a refund plus 30% of the total of our booking as a credit, so we could book something else last minute.

We were lucky we found something decent, and even though it cost us extra $100, we considered ourselves lucky that it wasn't more expensive than that. Oh, and we also got some unpleasant messages from the first Airbnb host 🤷🏻‍♂️

But also, I was starting to get sick. And we had to figure things out while getting soaked in the cold rain, so I spent the rest of the weekend in bed, drinking Sri Lankan tea and eating soup.

The reason we came to Florence was not to film a city video, but to film part of a secret project that's turning out to be more work than we anticipated, and more expensive than anticipated too... but we hope it's worth it since it's our first original idea! Seriously, there's no video out there like the one we're trying to make. That's all we're saying for now 🤐

Anyways, we're happy to report that Florence is as spectacular as we remember it. And even though we didn't have much time to walk around, we know it's a city we will always come back to 💞 (if we're lucky of course)

What's next?

Next Monday, we'll be saying hello from beautiful Napoli after a quick stop in Rome, which is also part of our secret project!

But as I mentioned earlier, we're heading into the unknown today. By the time you're reading this email, we'll already be in a town which name we pulled out of a hat at the Florence train station.

Make sure to check in next week to see where we ended up, and to see if our hypothesis of everywhere in Italy being from a photo book is true.

Thanks for reading!

Aimara & Gordon

Other links:

• ​I'm sharing all my Italy outfits every single day on Reward Style! Basically all the ways to style all the pieces I packed in my little carry-on bag :)
• ​We're on Patreon: Follow the link to check out other ways to support what we do. If you're interested... 😇 We will send you postcards and you'll have access to all the paid PDFs that we will continue to release in the future.
• Interested in a one-time thing instead? Buy us a coffee or leave us a tip here!

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