Email and the Internet

The Internet, and its accessibility via cybercafes scattered around Europe, has made communication unbelievably easy for travelers.With little effort, you can stay in touch with other travelers, check email, and reassure those at home that you haven’t been kidnapped and sold into slavery. For those who are unfamiliar with cybercafes, they are quite simply small bars or cafes offering Internet access in addition to the usual cafe fare of coffee, sandwiches, and salads. Most of the cybercafes I have visited have slightly outdated machines but they work just fine for receiving and sending email -which is likely what you’ll be using them for.

The process is simple enough: walk in, place your money on the counter (you usually pay per hour), log on to their browser, and surf away. The handiest part about these places is that there is always a local expert around who can help maneuver you through the sign-in procedures, just in case you can’t translate “enter the password” in Romanian (although a large number of the cafes I’ve visited have had Web browsers in English). Below are a couple of points about cybercafes:

- Like regular cafes, cybercafes seem to open and close every couple of weeks. I promise you that if ten cafes are listed in your guidebook, three have closed, two no longer have computers, and one has been converted into a fetish bar. The best way to locate a working cyber-cafe is to ask at your local tourist office, and then CALL FIRST, to see if and when they’re open. Had I done that a few months ago, it would have saved me a long cold trek through Copenhagen in the dead of winter to a cafe that was closed for the day.