Adventures of the Internet Deprived

I'm still getting no Internet connection from the Blackberry, so I'm back at the Internet cafe with a borrowed computer. I'm at about 30 hours without Internet access, and I think I'm starting to experience withdrawal. Has anything happened in the world? Well, I certainly wouldn't know. And if you wrote to tell me, I still wouldn't know, because I can't access this blog and see comments--or even read my e-mail, without a trip to the Internet cafe. We've got a TV at our beach retreat, but we haven't been watching much of it (because why would you when you're at a lovely place at the beach?). It's odd how sometimes the world seems to stop when you're on vacation. As a kid, I remember feeling that if something significant occurred during a vacation, it never felt real until you got home.

We had an interesting conversation the other night with a woman working behind the counter at an ice cream parlor. She was a college student from Russia working here for the summer to make some good money. Her visa was good until the beginning of October, and she planned to work as much as she could, take her money back to Russia where she could convert it to rubles, and finish her final year of university. Apparently a lot of Russians (and I suppose a number of people from other countries, as well) work at the beach during the summer. This woman told us that two others at the ice cream parlor were also Russian university students, and if we wandered up and down the strip, we'd find the same thing. It would be interesting to see how many nationalities would be represented in beach service jobs. When it comes down to it, I'm not sure if that’s a sign of how lucrative such summer employment can be or an indication of how limited financial opportunities can be around the world.

But it's back to life as we lived it in the twentieth century for me. We'll see if the Blackberry starts picking anything up tomorrow.