I had dinner in a Giraffe restaurant the other night. You know the places: friendly staff, reasonable food, good value – and plenty of two-for-one vouchers available online.

In fact, their whole website is pretty decent, and they understand how to use Twitter too.

Anyway, towards the end of the evening I did the usual um-and-er over dessert thing, until spotting the cheesecake on the menu. Had it just been “chocolate cheesecake”, I might have declined. But “milky double bubble chocolate cheesecake”? How could I say no?

That’s the power of good copywriting.

I like it when restaurants take the time to get their branding right. It implies a similar amount of effort has gone in to the food.

I had a meal in a Reading eaterie a couple of weeks ago. The bill turned up with this witty “with condiments” card, which perfectly fit the modern, relaxed feel of the place, and made me chuckle.

As it turned out the food was excellent, but if it hadn’t been, at least the clever copywriting would’ve gone some way to making up for it.

I have a bit of a thing for train journeys. Back in 2006 I travelled from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian railway. The journey takes around a week if you do it non-stop, but I spent about a month covering the 10,000-or-so kilometres. Although the romance of the rails might be all but dead in the UK, it certainly lives on in Russia.

It was one of the best journeys I can imagine. I shared a compartment (and vodka) with a bunch of Russian wrestlers, made friends with a cider-drinking man called Vladimir who helped me buy a new camera, then discovered the greatest lake in the world before arriving in Vladivostok, a wonderful city perched on the edge of the Pacific.

However, despite having some amazing stuff to see, the Russian government seems to have next to no interest in promoting the country as a tourist destination. The visa application alone is enough to put most people off, so it’s good that Google Russia has stepped up with its amazing online tour of the railway.

What they basically seem to have done is to stick a camera out the window for the entire journey, chopped the film down into manageable chunks, then wired the whole thing up to a map with highlights marked. It means you can jump between points on the journey, get additional information, and generally experience the bits of the trip you’re most interested in, from your desktop.

Now this is never going to be as good as doing it for real (trust me on this one), but the lack of flashy graphics and tourist board-supplied hype does make it a great way to get a taste for one of the greatest train journeys in the world. Go take a look for yourself.

(There are also a bunch of photos from my trip on Flickr, but be warned – I never got round to typing in descriptions of each photo!)