It
appears that many of you would like to know where you can get your e-mail on the road.
We did most of our travelling before I'd even
heard about e-mail,
and the only postcards we sent were ones with stamps.
How fast things change.
You might even be reading this from a Cyber
Café right now. If you are, it's nice to see that you are actually surfing instead of
connecting to someone else on another terminal.
In my experience, that is what most
Cybercafés get used for, IRC, WBS, or some other Chat channel.
If not, then people were playing shoot 'em up
Nukes, or other Games.
When I was first thinking about getting on the
Internet to learn HTML and inflict the world with my Web Pages, I used a local Cybercafé
to find out what it was all about.
I was a surfer straight away. Looking at what
others were doing and peeking at the source code. We had a new computer at home, but we
were not sure about getting on Online.
It soon became apparent that some of the sites
need you to register with an e-mail address, although there was no charge. Catch 22. How
to get an e-mail address?
The cybercafés offer e-mail addresses, but as
I hardly expected anyone to write to me, it seemed pointless to pay for an account.
We didn't know about Web Guides, so we bought Internet magazines to find out
about sites we were interested in, and went down with our URLs on a Sunday morning and
stayed there until well into the afternoon. The Sunday papers were not read online, I
still prefer to get the local news in print, but it's great to get news from around the world from a cyber café -- what's
going on back home, what's happening where you're travelling to next. You can even look at
a continent's weather.
Somewhere we read about free e-mail,
and got connected. With these accounts we could keep the same address if we ever left the
sheltered harbour of the Cybercafé, and went into the troubled waters of ISPs ourselves.
There was still something about viruses I
didn't like the sound of, and would rather keep them away from my files and programmes.
Next step, a home on the Web. In two or three weeks we
had become Cyber Citizens, and all it costed was access charged by the hour, and a few
coffees; with two sugars.
And The Cream?
Wherever you travel in the world today, you
can always check out the cybercafé listings before you go -- then access your email,
reply to every one in seconds, and update your
travel log immediately.
Until every traveller goes Bonnington style,
with a palm-sized computer and satellite feed, cybercafés are here to stay.
Featured Sites:
Internet
Cafés Guide: *****
Clean and easy to use professional product, linked in with cities.com and worldnews.com
for useful city searches and country news. Actually the people behind this seem to have
secured a whole range of domain names for sport, fashion, business and even population.
Quite an amalgamated database of active server pages.
Euro Cybercafés: ****
Bert's spent a lot of time on the presentation of his site, but loads the homepage up with
too many graphics and needless presentation of visitor statistics. The statistics that
count are how many cybercafes in Europe. Go over and give him another hit to boast about.
Ernst
Larson's Internet Café Guide: ****
Has a homely feel about it, and Ernst is freely available if you send him an e-mail. Tends
to run with too many banners, so click on a couple to earn him a few cents, or buy his
newly released book -- The Internet Café Guide.
Australian Internet Café Guide:
***
Gnomon Publishing don't just include cybercafés, but many other Net access points too.
Select a region on the side bar menu.
American Cyber Cafés: ***
Click on the colourful imagemap to get the returns for a state you're intersted in. No
messing with cybercafe details, you get links straight to their sites.
Curious Cat Cyber Café Connections:
**
Curious attempt at copy cat that fails to get the cream.
Internet Café Database: *
Lacks the human touch as it's fully automated. Cybercafés listings are basic and you'll
probably already have what your looking for from one of the better rated Netcafe guides
listed above.
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