... the Internet is magic.

[kaberett]

OKAY, so, back in 2007 I went on a school trip to Rome for a long weekend. On our one free early-afternoon I ended up getting to spend much less time at San Clemente than I'd intended, because Italian lunch hours, which in turn lead to me and the others I was with eating one of the best restaurant meals I had ever had for astonishingly little money, and it was only as we were leaving that we noticed the discreet stickers on the door about the place having been voted best-restaurant-in-Rome the preceding two years running.

My mother will be in Rome next weekend.

My mother, who remembers me rhapsodising about this place, asked me if I could recall the name.

... as it happened, I could remember (1) that the name started with an N and (2) the approximate walking route to get to it from San Clemente. Ergo five minutes with online maps later I had identified La Naumachia as the most plausible candidate, despite a rebrand having apparently done away with the very memorable logo of a ship. I look forward to hearing her report on it.

(Having explained how I found it, she responded: HAH!!!! That's the sort of thing I do. Indeed it's how the rat I ever found the same hotel I stayed in back then.... you come out of the back gate of the Inquisition past the best water fountain in Rome, go under a bridge past a dubious bus stop and up the hill most of the way to the next metro station....)

Comments

[vass]

The internet is magic.

And I like you and your mum's memory methods.

[azurelunatic]

My dad calls that one "rat-memory", and the internet is simply magic for it.

[davidgillon]

I love online maps, both for liking maps in general (side-effect of growing up as a wargamer - I think it's University of Texas has an online collection of esoteric historical maps, such as Russian military maps of Afghanistan and IIRC pre-WWII Nat Geo maps) and because they let me take some of the stress out of going new places, anywhere I need to go I look up in Google Earth first, dropping into Street View where needed.

I do the same thing where writing against a contemporary setting, which is really handy for places you've never been - Ooh, so if he's parked there, then she has to pass the flowerstall, cross the road towards the mirrored wall, she can see the harbour when she looks downhill past the car, and he's parked illegally in a cycle lane.... I'll confess to having spent hours with Google Earth working out precise addresses for my protagonists. And there are some books, such as William Gibson's latest trilogy, where I read them with one window open on Google Earth and another on Wikipedia.

[inoru_no_hoshi]

This is pretty much how my mom and I both remember directions to anywhere, though I start memorising street names if I go a route often enough, haha.

[kaberett]

Ha, I am the exact opposite - I memorise street names for the first couple of trips, then forget them in favour of how (for want of a better explanation) I map the world - I can reliably walk to someone's front door without having the faintest idea what their street name or house number is once I've done it once, maybe twice.