The Internet Cafe

Internet in Cairns sucks. None of the places that I have stayed have had great internet, if any. I don't spend much time on the internet. I do like to keep some semblence of what is happening in the real world, though, so I have had to seek internet cafes and McDonalds. I like McDonalds because I don't have to pay for the internet, but I have to buy something, so I buy an ice cream cone. They are $.50 and delicious. When I get fed up with McDs agonizingly slow internet I end up going to an internet cafe, which is where I am while typing this. The internet cafes here in Cairns are interesting places. If you take off your head phones you get a cacophony of sounds. There are several languages being spoken over Skype, people laughing at videos, and a baby crying. I don't know why someone brought their baby to an internet cafe, but they did.

I have had to kill some time before my flight so I found a cozy little interent cafe to lose myself for a couple of hours. Everyone gets their own little cubicle with a computer, which is funny. It is funny because people seem to think that by putting on a pair of headphones and having three little barriers around them that they have some privacy. Folks are clicking, typing, chatting, and video chatting away like they are in their own home. If you aren't wearing headphones, like me, you hear some interesting things. As you walk around looking for an open cubicle it is impossible to not look at other peoples computers. No one is looking at anything illicit, but there are so many people who watch videos of snakes eating hippos and women shooting automatic weapons. The internet is an endless array of anything that anyone wants, though, and internet cafes have proved that sentiment to be alive and well.

McDonalds is a great place to meet other free wifi seekers. The internet is so slow there so you end up talking to others on their laptops because most of your time is spent looking around while the webpage is loading. I have tried to time my web browsing with others sitting around so that we can wait for our pages to load together and have a conversation while the pages load instead of staring at the status bar and doing the nervous knee dance. The internet brings all types of people together online and to put a face on a few of those anonymous has been an amusing past time of mine while I have sought a portal to the series of tubes that makes up the internet. Seeing the people on the other end of the computers seems interesting to me.