Many of us are adapting to the "digital lifestyle" and consigning ever-greater portions of our daily lives to the internet but I, for one, was barely aware of "Google Earth". This, it turns out, is a search engine or mechanism for finding different geographical locations around the world and studying them on your computer screen, which provides the kind of view that only astronauts had in the past.
The source of my information was a pleasant Palestinian guide I met during a recent visit to Damascus. Mutasem Hayatla was very excited by the amount of space occupied on Google Earth by El Yarmouk.
El Yarmouk started out as a series of tents on a remote campsite. Now it is a bustling suburb of the sprawling Syrian capital. The residents are Palestinian refugees but the place is unlike any other refugee camp I have seen. Through sheer hard work, the Palestinians - some quarter of a million of them - have turned El Yarmouk into a thriving community. It does not have official refugee camp status and would be indistinguishable from many other districts in Damascus, were it not for the posters of the late Yasser Arafat and the assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin.
This is where Damascus residents come to buy clothing, shoes and ceramics. The nearest comparison, ironically enough, would be the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early part of the last century, when Jews from all over eastern Europe, fleeing persecution, arrived to find a new life for themselves and make a vast contribution to American life.
Syria is a land of surprises. The repressive policies of the government are well-known and human rights activists have rightly complained about political arrests, including the detention of the high-profile dissident writer Michel Kilo, severe restrictions on freedom of expression and association, and widespread reports of torture and ill-treatment.
Yet the Palestinians appear to be well-treated. Unlike neighbouring Lebanon, Syria places no restrictions on them in terms of employment. They have every right except the right to vote - a questionable privilege in such an authoritarian state. The New York-based Human Rights Watch organisation praised Syria recently for admitting Palestinian refugees and asylum seekers fleeing the violence in Iraq.
I had been in Damascus before for a short visit but, as sometimes happens to reporters, an urgent copy deadline meant I had little time to look around. On that occasion I arrived by air; this time by road. I started out in Beirut, from which the journey to Damascus takes about the same time as the drive from Dublin to Belfast.
When I saw the road-sign with the arrow pointing to Damascus, I was excited. A colleague cautioned me to watch out for bolts from the blue such as the one that famously struck St Paul. We stopped on the way to buy a sandwich in a store which doubled as a gun-shop. At the Syrian border there were several pictures of Hafez Al-Assad, the country's former ruler, who died six years ago. We were almost in Damascus before we saw a poster of his son, Bashar Al-Assad, who was an ophthalmologist in London before he got the call.
I had expected Damascus to be a forbidding place, like Minsk with sunshine, but it proved to be rather different. The cinemas were showing movies such as Memoirs of a Geisha and King Kong.
"The government here keeps a very close eye on security matters," said an Irish friend, with some understatement. Legend has it that an Irish visitor at a city hotel discovered that the full-length mirror in his room was also a doorway which opened into a corridor and, if you walked along, you could look into all the neighbouring rooms as well. The Syrians learnt a lot from their association with the former Soviet Union. However, security men were less obtrusive than I expected and seemed to be mainly plainclothes rather than uniformed.
Damascus is cheap, a bargain-hunter's paradise. It is also caught in a time-warp and the clothes in the shops are those of yesterday, or even the day before. But if you look hard enough, you will find what you want and the aromas from the goods on offer in the open-air stalls make even walking down the street a treat for the senses. The Syrians are trying to promote tourism and their low retail prices should be a big help.
Arranging transport from Damascus back to Beirut is an adventure in itself. The cab from my hotel dropped me off at a station or depot in the city centre where I found myself at the centre of an instant scrum. Within seconds two people had grabbed my luggage and I trailed after them, half enjoying the experience, half terrified they were going to rob me.
"Give me your passport," someone said. He was a civilian but I handed it over without protest, because there are times when you just have to trust people. Then I tried to quell the rising panic as I waited to get it back. There was no need to be concerned. My little wine-coloured book was returned to me and for $20 a driver took me back in an elderly Chevrolet which I shared with two other passengers.
Like Douglas MacArthur leaving the Philippines I pledged that "I shall return" to Damascus. It's a shade more exotic than the Isle of Man. The menu in a city restaurant, for example, offered "Fried Brain" and "Brain on Bread". You don't have to eat these items but it's fun to know they are there. Nor did I order "Sheep's Testicles with Potatoes". Some experiences I refuse to have, even for the readers of The Irish Times.