Kahney's Korner: Italy

Hi, I'm Leander Caney. I'm the editor and publisher of Cultimac.com and this is another amazing edition of Caney's Corner

I've just returned from my woefully short vacation, annual vacation in Italy

We went to Italy with the kids this year and my god, what a fantastic country

Yeah, I love Italy. I'm a total Italianophile or whatever it is. Food's great, wine's great, people, not so friendly, but who can blame them with a million tourists there every year

My wife was terrified of getting a ginormous cell phone bill when we got back, so she crippled all our phones

She turned off all the data, all the roaming. And she got this weird plan, which was like we could text each other, which seemed like a really good idea

until we realised that we were going to be together all day, every day, so we actually didn't text each other hardly at all

So we couldn't use our phones for anything. We didn't have maps, we didn't have the internet, we didn't have Instagram, we didn't have Facebook

We couldn't make any updates. It was almost like we'd been, you know, left the planet for three weeks

And that had upsides and downsides. So it's actually kind of a relief not to know where we were

You know, maps, for example, we had to revert to good old paper maps. And, you know, we actually had a pretty good idea of where we were most of the time

especially my daughter, who earned the nickname Tom Tom from this Italian pizza guy

who was amazed by her ability to know exactly where she was, just like a Tom Tom GPS unit at all times

But the paper maps are great. You know, you can always have a pretty good idea of where you are, where you're going

And that's the nice thing about being in somewhere like Italy and like Florence or Venice. You actually want to be lost. You actually don't want to know where you are all the time

So it wasn't always easy to find a good place to eat because we couldn't check Yelp, couldn't find the ratings for the restaurants

You know, that was sometimes a little bit of a, you know, gone on blind faith or gone on recommendations

We also couldn't, you know, book hotels or train tickets. You know, we had to make sure we were on Wi-Fi

Getting on the airplane, doing the early booking for that was like a little bit of a headache

For the most part, I didn't really miss it. You know, Twitter, just a stream of bad news

So was email. Oh, my God. I was really glad not to see email every day

The web, I like to read the newspapers, but, you know, I could get by with checking out on Wi-Fi every morning

So for the most part, you know, it really wasn't that much of a loss. It was actually really nice, a relief to be without the Internet for three weeks

So the one thing I did use every day was the good old Apple Watch. We used it to track how far we walked every day, 10 miles, 12 miles, 8 miles

That was actually pretty good, 222,000 steps. So we used this every single day, and that was actually kind of indispensable

Oh, yeah, and I used it to tell the time, too. So there's been another great Cane This Corner brought to you from cultofmic.com

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