Interesting stuff I learned on holiday

So the missus and I just got back from a lovely holiday in Italy, hence the lack of activity on here (that and me being a bit busy). We started in Pisa and drove through Florence, Siena and a few pretty little villages before ending up in Rome and checking out vast quantities of renaissance art along the way.

And the interesting things I've learned have almost nothing to do with any of that.

The first is that I have become very dependent on having mobile internet access to the extent that I'm a little blind if I have to go somewhere and can't use Google Maps. This isn't so much a problem with actually walking around because I can read a paper map (I'm not completely useless) and if you're on holiday then hopefully you're on quite a loose schedule and can afford to take the scenic route.
But it was a problem any time I needed other information like "where is a good place to sit with a coffee and read a book" or when the last metro train was which can usually be taken care of in a couple of Google searches.
This is what comes to my mind whenever I see anything about how Google Glass is going to be amazingly useful when traveling to foreign cities because you can have maps etc in front of your eye all the time. Unless you're also willing to treble your phone bill to get mobile internet as well then Google Glass is going to be pretty useless.

The second thing is something which I think about every time I go abroad which is that brand names become significantly more important.
Specifically food brands.
More specifically McDonald's.

In the UK I'll go to McDonald's about once a month or so but for the most part it doesn't form part of my lunch schedule. I know exactly what I'll get (and how bad I'll feel for the 6 hours after) and generally don't find it particularly appealing.
Abroad however, boring becomes reassuring. Ideally of course you'd mainly go to nice local places but one of the curses of our holidays tends to be having to walk around for hours looking for somewhere that is nice enough, available enough and cheap enough for us to sit down and eat/drink.
With all the mental energy being spent on sightseeing and where to go next sometimes it's often easier to go to where you know exactly what you'll get and which, while not the finest cuisine in the world, is at least reliable.

Anyway that's about it, I suppose the only other thing is that each hotel we stayed in had free WiFi which seems like it's rapidly becoming standard. Especially as none of the hotels we stayed in were particularly expensive.

Other brief things:

- Since seeing the Colosseum in person I've had an overwhelming urge to watch Gladiator

- Roger Ebert died which is very sad. With film critics I think the best way is to check Rotten Tomatoes (ignore IMDB) and then check with one or two critics who you tend to agree with and whom you trust. Mine are/were Roger Ebert and Empire magazine. I could write more about him but there's already an impressive array of tributes on the internet to attest to what an influential (and friendly) guy he was. I'd particularly recommend his bitterly sarcastic reviews of films he clearly hated

- The other sad news is that Iain Banks announced that he had terminal cancer. I studied The Wasp Factory for A-Level and have read a few of his Culture novels but my kindle reading list over the next few months is definitely going to feature him heavily

- I was going to do a post on the impact of the 2013 Budget on the polling situation but so far that seems to be pretty minimal. I will have something political up soon though