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Friday 2005-09-23 - Xi'an, China
First time Internet
With our busy program in Beijing and the very tiring hike along the Great Wall, I never had time to go to an Internet cafe to write my travel blog. Not that there aren’t enough Internet cafes in Beijing now, they seem to be sprouting up all over again, from little neighborhood places to big halls with hundreds of work stations.
This afternoon I sit down and write out my first stories; then together with Carla I go to an Internet cafe in Xi’an that Marie Josee told us about. Next to a bookstore, up two flights of no-longer functioning escalators is a large room with maybe several hundreds of machines. They have two rates: 3Ұ per hour for a fast connection, or 2Ұ for a somewhat slower machine (good enough for me). You simply pay a fixed amount for a chip card which operates the machine, and when you’re done you get the remainder back in cash.
A friendly attendant helps me to set up a US-English keyboard: impossible for me since the whole interface is in Chinese. First on is Carla, to write an email home, then it’s my turn. I don’t like the keyboard and make a lot of typos but at least I have a spell checker in Squirrel Mail.
On the way back I find some of the group at the restaurant around the corner from the hotel and we all have dinner together, with a delicious draft beer.
