Giulia & Juan

Picture this: September 2021. Peak Covid. Cold, rainy, grey Dutch weather. Face masks everywhere, social distancing, and a village in the middle of nowhere in a Dutch polder, a full three metres below sea level, of all places. Sweet Like City, they called it.

The setting? An almost empty old factory, with everyone working from home and offices built in the 1960s, apparently never renovated since. The unmistakable fragrance of resin desks, printer ink and safety shoes. Somewhere in the distance, a colleague shouted, “Mark, I think your mic is off! If you’re speaking, you’re on mute!”, accompanied by the gentle flickering of fluorescent lights from the ceiling.

Now add a passionate, blue eyed, bespectacled Sicilian Sustainability Manager in a white lab coat and a Spanish Project Manager in a freshly ironed Ralph Lauren shirt, boat shoes and D&G perfume. Can you imagine a more romantic setting? Ja, neither could we!

Little Giulia, charmed by her new southern colleague, found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on reducing CO₂ emissions and calculating PCFs. Juan, meanwhile, discovered that factory projects and stakeholder management were somehow becoming less interesting by the day.

And so began a not very HR approved collaboration between two colleagues that gradually grew closer than strictly necessary.

There was one small complication: both of their hearts were supposedly elsewhere. It did not take long to realise that elsewhere might not have been the right place after all.

Giulia’s interest was evident from the very beginning, but it still took Juan several months of hard work, his finest tricks and old fashioned gallantry.

His questionable flirting finally convinced her to have a drink with him after work.

What followed was a wonderful sequence of suspiciously innocent events: lunches together at the office, walks after work, exchanged songs and increasingly long conversations.

Then, entirely coincidentally, Juan planned a climbing trip to Sicily. To Catania, obviously. It couldn’t be too obvious. That trip somehow got extended by an extra week so he could visit Palermo and its surroundings, where Giulia just happened to come from.

Now it was Giulia’s turn to impress: Monreale. Cefalù. Mondello. Palermo. Arancine… How could anyone resist? And the rest, as they say, is history.

Little Saladino quickly realised that jamón ibérico, sidra and cachopos might actually be better than elephants, Madras and biryanis.

And the Asturian, after perhaps integrating a little too successfully into Dutch culture, rediscovered the pleasure of a lunch lasting longer than 15 minutes and involving something more than bread and cheese.

He also learned that cooking pasta in the microwave was, apparently, a capital sin.

Some compromises were clearly going to be necessary. Dozens of countries, thousands of kilometres, countless adventures and many thousands of metres climbed later, here we are. Still together.