Unbeknownst to the majority of the readers of this blog (a.k.a. "the other five guys") I'm actually in Florence, Italy since Wednesday evening and officially on holiday with the family. Hooray! Well, except that I've managed to catch a nasty cold on Tuesday and that the weather here is rather dismal... so I spent a lot of the time here sitting in the 14th century apartment of our wonderful hosts and enjoy cups of columbian lime tea and 3Mbs/s wireless internet...

Yesterday evening, after the kids were finally asleep (the percentage of stuff that they are not allowed to play with in this apartment is way higher than at home, poor guys...) Mascha and I took a nice (dry!) walk through the centre of Florence (our hosts live a convenient 800 metres from the Ponte Vecchio) and I really can't help but admit that I was rather impressed how beautiful everything is... It's quite a difference to see a few isolated beautiful buildings but every single one in an entire city? Mindboggling... It's not so much that every house is something special in itself but rather that all of them - out of tradtition, I presume - have been built following the same set of classical design principles that are simply pleasing to the eye - unlike, say, in Berlin where every other house is designed according to some school of design or other (if you're lucky) and a lot of them have been downrightly abused by Eastern German "modernizations" or post-reunification investors.

Well, if the weather gets better we'll undertake some trips around Toscany - if not I'll tinker some more with my instaPlone script and watch reruns of the Daily Show's Indecision 2004 and the recent episodes of the Colbert Report (man, is that guy nuts, or what?)