Internet Cafes
The twins have never been to an internet cafe. They were a staple of my post-college travel world. Finding the internet cafe in a new city, paying the fee, buying a coffee, using the hour to try to log in and see one or two messages while chatting with the person next to you, who was also waiting for their email to slowly load on the screen.
We now travel with portable wifi, and while slower than the internet speeds at home, the twins have no clue what life was like in the late 90s and decade beyond.
It was slow communication even though it was technically fast communication because there were long pauses between messages. Now, you expect people to get your message instantly or within a few hours. Back then, it could be days before I ventured into an internet cafe, plunked down the money, and logged in to see what was waiting in my inbox. Emails were closer to letters than text messages. You had to prioritize how you spent your time online because it was so expensive.
We’re planning a trip, and I thought about how we used to plan our itinerary, noting where the internet cafes were in a country. And now we can FaceTime someone across the Atlantic, whenever we want, wherever we want if we can get a signal. It’s a bizarre world.
4 comments
I was thinking along similar lines this weekend when I was in a nearby city with my daughter and we paused our wandering to read outside – it was beautiful out. She finished her physical book so we checked out an e book from the library on my phone and wanted to load it onto the kindle I had. To do that we had to go in to the cafe nearby and use their free wi fi – multiple times. It was one of those things she’s never had to deal with as she only uses devices in our home or at school. She was laughing as I clumsily had to connect both the phone and the kindle and upload books. But it is quite a world when we have access to so much reading material with only a few clicks.
I have never used an internet cafe. I think I just wasn’t traveling when those were the standard. Or I didn’t need to communicate with anyone. I think, between 1995 and 2004, I just took being incommunicado as the norm. After that, we had cell phones and then cell phones with data, and now I can’t escape people!
I’m so old! I remember finding internet cafes and having to use hotel business centres, and thinking how incredibly modern they were. Because of course my first overseas adventures were in the pre-internet days. I remember sending a fax message to a hotel where my parents were staying to welcome them to the UK on their first ever trip there. And getting faxes from my boss when he was in Mongolia and I was in the Philippines.
Even more recently, travelling to South Africa. Our first trip in 2009 had periods of isolation – no internet at all at my safari lodges. Whereas this time, I sat on the deck of my safari tent, recording the elephants that came to visit, and immediately uploaded them to social media.
Beth’s right though – the immediate availability of wifi and books though is wonderful!
I was just commenting to my husband this past weekend about something our kids would never understand…but I can’t even remember what. LOL
Oh..internet cafes, I never needed one, and never really hung out at the one in town because they were also a rival coffee house. Those were teen years I’d like to jump back into, sometimes, at some places.