« Kids First Village and on to Hue | Main | A Happy 60th Anniversary! »
March 08, 2005
Internet cafes and posting pictures from Vietnam
We're sitting in an Internet place in Hue on Wednesday morning.
Ed is finishing a post I started about our latest set of activities, but I thought I'd talk a little about our experience using the Internet from a third world country.
Internet places are everywhere in Vietnam. Even the smallest villages we've cycled through have them. Usually they're just a store front jammed with a couple of rows of computers, hooked up through a DSL connection. The places (they don't typically serve food, so I hesitate to call them "cafes") are always jammed with people, usually teenagers of both genders. The main activities seem to be instant messaging (mostly Yahoo) and gaming. The kids can all type unbelievably fast.
All the computers we've seen are old, running Windows 98. I don't think I've seen a single machine running Windows XP, though someone in our group claims to have seen a few. Though the hardware is old and well-used, the machines mostly seem to be well functioning and well maintained.
Some of the hotels have had connections in the hotel, with publci stations in the lobby, but not all of them do.
My favorite Internet experience was in Cua Lo, where we asked the hotel clerk if they had Internet and he led us through the lobby, out the side door of the hotel to his motorbike. He had us both climb on the back of the bike (motorbikes are commonly conveyances for three or four in Vietnam) and motored us down the street a half-mile to the local Internet place, where we were completely surrounded by giggling teenage girls who were reading over our shoulders as we typed.
It will be very interesting to see what social changes come about as a result of this explosion of technology use in Vietnam - it's another part of the worldwide communications genie that can't be stuffed back into the bottle.
We've been a little frustrated about our inability to post pictures as we travel. It's certainly not because we haven't been taking any - as a matter of fact I had to go out and buy more memory cards yesterday (remind me to not buy a Sony camera next time - the proprietary Memory Stick technology is way more expensive than other memory). But most of the machines don't have ports open for hooking up cameras, and the connection speeds are spotty enough that trying to upload photos doesn't seem like a good way to spend the little free time we have around the edges of our days.
You can count on LOTS of pictures of our trip, and more commentary, being posted once we return. We've talked with the other bike riders about creating an index to all the places where everybody's pictures are posted, so you'll be able to view the whole group's experiences.
Keep those comments coming folks!
Posted by oren at March 8, 2005 06:16 PM