Ethics class was actually pretty interesting today. We began talking about Aquinas' Four Laws (eternal, divine, natural and human). We also discussed the Four Ethical Traditions. The Deontological tradition was pretty harsh. There's no shades of gray. If something is right it is always right and if something is wrong it is always wrong. I. Kant came up with the Categorical Imperative in the 18th century. The Imperative is something you are duty driven to do without exception and according to Kant, you should never lie under any circumstances. We went into lies of commission, omission and ambiguity and all that jazz. But the most interested thing to me was the examples that Dr. W gave. He said that by Kant's standards if you knew your friend was going to be in the coffee shop at exactly 2PM and a man who was planning to kill your friend asked you where they would be at exactly 2PM, you are obligated to tell the truth. And if you didn't tell the truth and told the killer that your friend would be in the bookstore and your friend happened to have made a pitstop in the bookstore and was still there at 2PM, you are guilty of leading the killer to the victim (according to Kant). Pretty extreme.

Anyway after class and lunch we trekked across the city again, over the Ponte Vecchio to the Boboli Gardens. The Gardens are a part of the Palazzo Medici (Medici Palace) which was designed for Cosimo de' Medici (the name of our hotel) during the Renaissance and home to the most wealthy family (the Medicis) in Florence. The palace is open to the public now because the Medici family was thrown out of Florence because they were seen as a threat to the republic. The house/palace itself is HUGE. Its amazing to walk through it with the thought that people actually lived there. Its so oversized and over the top ornate and everything is just huge. The gardens themselves are ridiculous in size. Much to our dismay though, they were virtually all up hill, down hill, up again, down again. We had planned to do climb the 463 steps to the top of dome on the Duomo, but it wasn't happening after those gardens. There's no way people actually just strolled that thing for leisure.

I'm pretty ready to move on to Germany. I'm ready to have a sense of time again. There are hardly any clocks to be found in Italy, not even in our hotel room. Numbers, I'm told, are a very big thing to Germans so apparently there's a clock on every corner, on every side of every building in Munich. And there's the Lego Museum :)

I'm ready to have clocks, hopefully public restrooms, ice in drinks, no men that act like pigs and hopefully a decently designed road system.

Paper time. Maybe a black and white party tonight?