Travel Broadens The Mind...Globetrotting

I've been travelling this week peeps and being as I had to shut Audrey down for take off and landing, BA's business:life magazine got a pretty good going over. So I've found a whole lot of new travel trivia to broaden your mind/help you win your next pub quiz.

Let's start with the big picture.

It would seem that the economic climate has not done anything to significantly dampen our wanderlust with the number of international tourists increasing by 4% last year to 1.035bn. Where they have been going, who knows. But I'll bet it's not to one of the world's ten most pessimistic nations, eight of which are in Europe.

Britain's youngsters are also doing their bit to boost the travel dollar with 78% of them having travelled abroad at least once and more than 38,000 of them flying out of Heathrow on BA unaccompanied last year. Perhaps they are off to see one or two of the 79% of British expats who have no intention of returning to the UK. Or perhaps a bit of fiscal squeezing - after all £26,500 is the average full-time salary in Britain - means that the precious little darlings are simply leaving Mummy and Daddy at home.

But let's think about some other possible reasons for fleeing England's green pastures grey dampness. Contrary to what you may be expecting, I'm not putting the weather at the top of the list although it's probably up there. But the Brits already love to moan about weather that's uncomfortable, inconvenient and inclement and quite frankly, need no futher encouragement.

No, it would appear that there may be a darker tale to be told. 

It would seem that 53% of UK employees think it is OK to steal confidential corporate data - I'll bet you anything you like that their employers are a little less accepting. But as 68% of UK private sector employees are not members of a workplace retirement scheme, I'll leave you to do the maths on what the benefits of such information-gathering may bring and how all those English expats can afford to stay abroad.

So what else could one do with a few extra quid? Well, you could book yourself in to a Moscow hotel room - you'll find the most expensive rooms in the world there - or treat yourself to a little nip and tuck and become just another one of the 15 million people around the world having plastic surgery (or they were in 2011 anyway).

But if you are not inclined to such corporate indiscretion, you may well have been exposed in other ways, finding yourself on someone's social media feed, the focal point of a work Christmas 'do' montage. You'd be in the minority though as only 11% of British workers have had embarrassing photos taken of them at a work event and uploaded to a social media site.

London's Lord Mayor Boris Johnson 'hanging around'.

In the meantime, it would seem that while the rest of the world embraces the wonders of modern technology (did you know that 75% of the world's heads of state are on Twitter), the French remain firmly rooted in the antiquated traditonal: 46 cheques are issued per person per year in France compared with the average across all 17 EC members states being two. Vive la penmanship!

And just when you thought, after roaming the world botoxed and sans parents, you'd return to the comfortable and familiar, it's all change back in Ol' Blighty with Polish officially becoming Britain's second language.

It leaves me wondering how 'cor blimey guv'nor' translates...

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Travel Broadens The Mind - Back Catalogue
...Worrywarts
...Let's Play!
...It's A Virtual Life
...The Euro Zone
...All About The Readies
...Flights Of Fancy
...Or So They Say