Sunday, May 13, 2007

Fish Outta Water

One of the challenges with a new environment is to establish ways of communicate with the outside world. So what has Q tried so far?

- Internet. The wonderfully equipped hotel does not have internet, not even you are willing to pay for it. Just outside the hotel wall there is wireless signal, but it's very weak and unstable. So we have the ever-popular internet cafes. Personally I've been to a few of them around the world, and I have to give it to the ones in UAE - they are definitely unique in their own way: clean cubicles, slow computers, and loud "neighbours". (N.B. by comparision, the Chinese ones are dirty, slow and quiet.) Q and I tried to have our date one night, and it took him 4 tries to find a decent computer - "decent" as it only crashed every half an hour instead of five minutes. The chat setup was the kicker - MSN didn't work, so we used Gtalk for voice and Yahoo msnger for video. The end result? See Q above. Woohoo! :)

- Cell phone. Q got a local cell phone number on the 3rd day, and he's still trying to figure out why we couldn't txtmsg each other. At least phone calls work though, at the cost of 2 Dhr (~C$ .60) per minute, so quite expensive.

- Hotel phone. This works - thanks God. But I have yet to understand what the hotel receptionists are saying when they pick up the calls. (N.B. Apparently I have great difficulties with understanding Indo/Pakistanian accents.) I am almost certain that they say "hello" at one point. ;)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great pic!!!