I have been travelling a lot over the last few months (Czech Republic, Scotland, France, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy). That travel, plus my catching up on a load of reading is my excuse for the woeful lack of posts to trivia of late. But hey, sometimes life gets in the way of blogging – which is as it should be.
A couple of things struck me whilst I have been away though. Firstly, and most bizarrely I noticed a significant number of tourists in popular, and hugely photogenic, locations (such as Prague and Dubrovnik) wandering around staring at their smartphones rather than looking at the reality around them. At first I thought that they were just checking photographs they had taken, or possibly that they were texting or emailing friends and relatives about their holidays, or worse, posting to facebook, but that did not appear to be the case. Then by chance I overheard one tourist telling his partner that they needed to “turn left ahead” whilst they walked past me so it struck me that they might just possibly be using google maps to navigate. So I watched others more carefully. And I must conclude that many people were doing just that. I can’t help but feel a little saddened that someone should choose to stare at a google app on a small screen in their hand rather than look at the beauty of something like the Charles Bridge across the Vlatva.
The second point which struck me was how much of a muppet you look if you use an iPad to take photographs.