Internet Crisis
Saturday, February 10th.
It’s good to wake up in our own place. I sip cold tea and write last nights blog. We don’t have internet in our apartment so we load our computers into our backpacks and set out to walk the 20 minutes to an internet café. We arrive there just after 9:00, order our coffees and find a corner of the café to call our own. Art’s wireless works perfectly, but mine is somehow disabled. I stay calm, but I am pretty stressed out over this situation. I am wired on coffee but my wireless is dead. Art spends the next hour trying to solve this dilemma while I walk to find a pay phone to call home; at least my phone card work.
Two hours later we leave the café and hike back towards our apartment. We stop at Pet Box again to look at the Rhinoceros Beetles and eat a mediocre lunch at a strip mall restaurant. The day is deteriorating rapidly. 35 years ago I might have looked cute when I backpacked through Europe, but I feel self conscious and discouraged today.
Art has been looking for a bicycle for me these past three days so after dropping our back packs at our apartment we walk in the other direction to buy a bike. $160 later, I ride a folding Newton home.
Tadashi arrives at 3:00 P.M. with the solution to my internet connection. He drives us to a business that sells special wireless cards. John and I wait patiently for over an hour as Art and Tadashi work with the salesmen trying to install the card into my computer. It doesn’t work. Next Tadashi drives us to our local strip mall to help me purchase denatured alcohol. If my computer doesn’t work, I want to at least have fuel for my alcohol lamp so that I can begin to carve waxes. Tadashi has been of great help this afternoon but he is a brand new father and we know he needs to get home so we tell him we will do some grocery shopping and walk home. (Did I mention that we are carrying our backpacks with our computers again?) We are all tired, indecisive and cranky. We buy some prepackaged salads and sashimi for dinner, walk home, and as I type this are spending our first night together in our new apartment. Art is watching bad Japanese television and John is doing Algebra homework. I hope that tomorrow holds something more exciting to write about.
