OMG Ona Finally Discovers Wireless Internet

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  Torun, Poland
Saturday, August 19, 2006

My god, I can't believe it has taken me this long to finally discover the wonder that is free wireless internet. I've been staying with my family for the 2 days since I've gotten back from Germany and I realized the monumental amount of work I had piled up so I decided to go for a wee trip to the Internet Cafe in Lipno. But given the fact the stupid bastard was closed (I mean come on, if you can't manage to open by the time I drag myself out of bed, there's something wrong) and the fact that three seperate people carried on about how likely it was to get robbed both in the Cafe and in the town at large - the hooligans come out on weekends apparently, I decided to get my butt over to Torun, an hour away by rickety bus.

It will be fine, I thought, Lonely Planet has 2 internet cafe's listed, one of them 24 hour, and Torun is full of hip people that wear overpriced shoes, there's no way my plan can go wrong. Well go wrong it did. First I was sidetracked by shoe shops. Now I thought that Freiburg was the leading per capita posessor of shoe shops, but apparently I was wrong. So I absolutely had to stop and buy an adorable pair of aged-green 50's type heels with wee flowers embroidered on them. I ABSOLUTELY HAD TO (don't mind my description of them though, I think it might sound a bit horrid and tacky).

* NUMBER OF PAIRS OF HIGH HEELS ONA IS CURRENTLY CARRYING WHILST BACKPACKING: 3

And then it went wrong further when I couldn't find the first cafe listed in Loney Planet, so I ABSOLUTELY HAD TO go into some random store and buy a lovely creme summer dress to go with the aforementioned shoes. Now, all I was thinking at this point was 'Wouldn't it be smashing to sit by the Thames in Oxford, wearing my wee shoes and my adorable little dress, basking in the sunlight and watching the dashing young men from the university boating past wearing those queer straw hats!' Now, obviously this mode of reasoning has a few critical flaws. Firstly, does a river even go past Oxford, and is it the Thames? My only knowledge of English geography comes from some vague fictional context to do with Victorian England and possibly Oscar Wilde. Secondly, Charis and I are going to England in what amounts to the dead of winter, and wearing the dress I now possess would result in both hypothermia and severe embarrasment, as the inevitable sleet worked its magic on the see-through-in-the-best-of-times fabric. And finally, but perhaps most importantly, I don't think dashing young chaps boating down rivers in straw hats whilst reciting ever so slightly homoerotic poetry to each other have existed in England for many a decade, if not a century. Shame, I suppose.

But I digress! The Internet Quest. Yes. So finally in possession of a new outfit I resumed my quest. Whereupon I learnt that the cafe I was in search of no longer existed, hadn't existed for quite some while. No problem, I thought, there's another one. Surely Lonely Planet cannot let me down for the 84th time. But alas! It did. The Internet sign at the correct address for the second, and last, cafe pointed to a closed, locked door! With opening times indicated that the door should and this very second be open! Yay!

So off I went, thinking that surely there must be another internet cafe in this place. An hour of walking proved that there wasn't, but then, behold! A sign that gave me hope! 'Hotspot here', printed ever so neatly on the door of a mobile phone store. I had heard of these mythical hotspots before, at many a youth hostel where free wireless internet was offered. But in those times of folly, I had not taken my laptop, to shamelessly take what was freely offered. And well Charis was too damn forgetful to buy an Airport card off Ebay for hers. So I had to investigate this newfangled 'hot spot'! So the kindly lady carried on for a while, telling me the prices for so and so many hours on wireless, and then pointed me outside and told me to take my laptop to the beer garden and test to see if it picked up the network, before I paid.

Away I went, swallowing my fears of my 7000 zloty of computer equipment being snatched by a degenerate youth running past. And lo! The internet was free! The dastardly woman had told me lies, and everything magically worked without me paying a cent. And it was fast, and I downloaded everything I needed, and I checked my bank, and I checked my mail, and I even phoned 4 people in 2 different countries in Skype for 40 euro cents. Called them out of thin air! Ah how technology never ceases to amaze me.

So we come to now, where I am sitting in my quaint little room at a hotel called Petit Fleur (oh and by the way, never open their website in a public space, say on a laptop in a beer garden, or else insanely loud cheery french music - like the beginning of 'Allo 'Allo - will blare out at you and everyone else within a 50m radius), enjoying more FREE FREE WIRELESS! I've been feeling a bit self-indulgent recently and wanting some totally alone time, so I thought why not get a room at a cute restored 17th century townhouse, with a sitting room downstairs that would suit old Oscar ever so well. Then I could sit here like this and write self-indulgent entries. And in-between self-indulgent entries I could go downstairs to the Gothic cellar and have Steak Tartare (actually, I was very pleasantly suprised by this second foray into raw beef, it was exceedingly nice, despite looking like a gigantic patty of raw lean minced beef plonked down on my plate. Certainly it was better than the Beef Carpaccio I had in Sydney, of which I shall not speak). And then I could procrastinate instead of doing the work I have to do. Because procrastination is the thing I do best.

Ahhh, I feel better already.


UPDATE:

Okay, can someone tell me what the deal is with wireless internet? Does it have some sort of insane 20 mile radius from where the signal is generated from? I ask, because I got back to Lipno this afternoon and booted up my laptop...I had forgotten to turn Airport off, and lo and behold, I am currently on another free network! Now let's make this clear, Poland is not the most technologically advanced nation at the best of times, and Lipno is a tiny little country town of 10,000 people, in the middle of nowhere, near no big cities, with even dial-up internet prices something ridiculous like 2 dollars a minute. Now, the only explanation I can think of is that theres some company with an office nearby that has a wireless network for its employees, and its managers went 'Oh, we won't bother making it a closed, password-protected network, AS IF any of these pathetic country people will have internet anyway'. Well sucked in maties, I'm now downloading movies from your network at 30k/s.

But seriously, if anyone has an actual explanation for this I'd be ever so oblidged if you would let me know.

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