A week after an earthquake damaged fiber-optic cables south of Taiwan, sending e-mails and browsing the web in Beijing (and many other places in the Far East) is still a hassle.
It's not exactly the Stone Age, although some Chinese bloggers felt that way. "No Internet. No life", wrote the China Daily. And kicking your computer wouldn't solve anything...
Complete inaccessibility of the Internet would be worse, but then again you could go to the beach, lock yourself up in a room with a shelf full of books or explore the nightlife in town till early morning. But the web is still accessible, so at least one knows what's going on in the world. Still, it's a frustrating experience. You never know in advance which websites will be OK, which will we slow as a turtle, and which will never show up on the screen.
Sending e-mails with an attachment is equally an exercise in frustration: try and fail, try and fail and maybe, with a lot of luck, on the twentieth or the fiftieth try, it will go through... Reports indicate traffic will only return to normal by January 15. At least we know now how dependent we have become on the Internet, surfing, blogging, chatting, skyping, googling, wikipedia-ing, flickring, youtubing,... What a way to start the new year!
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