And I thought Andalucia is touristy ...

.... but that was before I walked around Florence on a random morning during off-season (today). I got up at around 6 am today because Max seem to have decided that that's the time he wants to get up in Italy. We spent some time trying to learn how to read but haven't made it much past the ma, me,mi, mo,mu and pa, pe, pi, po, pu. He really isn't much into it and I am trying to come up with fun stuff to do while walking around like finding 5 ma's on street or other signs but the potential for distraction is enormous and it isn't easy to keep him focussed. Later Uli and Max went to visit the fortezza, formerly known as castillo, but there weren't any canons to be seen there much to Max's disappointment.

So I had the rest of the morning off to walk to the centro with my camera and look around, went around the Duomo and on to Palazzo Vecchio next to the Uffici with all the big statutes around and took my first pictures of Firenze and my first impression of what tourist season in Florence means. The line for group entrance to the Duomo was snaking halfway around the building and it is a large building. Everywhere large tourgroups, many of then teenager on what seems to be school outings who can barely pretend to be interested in anything other than themselves, the next gelati store and maybe the stalls with leather bags,wooden Pincchio figurines and woven braclets - we'll I guess I can't complain about that too much as I can still remember that school trip to Rome and our major obsession with flea markets and major annoyance when having to read and translate those darn Latin sentences on tombstones. Then there are lots of Asian groups and the Eastern Europeans definitely have arrived as well.

Huge groups with umbrella wielding tourguides are everywhere and if you care to listen you can hear in a dozend different languages that the cupola of the Duomo is 42 meters wide. Why they always tell you such trivia that nobody ever remember is beyond me. History, one should think, is full of juicy stories that would make for much better entertainment than the exact dimensions of the cupola. To differentiate themselves among the many groups the Asian tour guides have come up with a new idea: instead of wielding umbrellas to keep their flock together they are using sticks with tiny stuffed animals attached - very cute but see for yourself. This one shows a pink animal descretly hiding what Max calls the "pipisito" of Neptune.

The Germans for once seem to be a minority, a sizable one but still, as well as Americans. The later are often easy to recognize as the guys are wearing shorts with white tennis socks and no sweater or jacket despite temperatures in the low 60s. No Italian male would want to be caught dead in such an outfit anywhere outside the sports arena, and even there ....

The Palazzo Vecchio sported a big red sign saying "Human Rights for Tibet". I tried to get a picture of that sign with the statute of Perseus holding Medusa's severed head - thought it might have symbolic interest. However, it didn't work out all that well as I was chased off my vantage point and the black head of Medusa isn't easy to photograph under the best of circumstances. I tried to come up with different shots of the usual suspects David and Neptune etc. with mixed success guess the best thing would be to walk around with a big ladder - that way one could get view points other people typically will not get.

Today Sabine sent me the pdf of the interview we did in Frigiliana for her newspaper SurDeutsche. Nice piece of PR - a bit of Q&A about our trip and a picture of Max and me sitting on a little wall with Frigiliana in the background. I have never been featured in a newspaper before with links to this blog and my photo webpage so this is very exciting. I haven't figued out a way to post it here or on the webpage but if I do I will certainly put it up.