Entry #5: Internet Woes – Starbucks Undelights – Blogging on the Beach

When I travel, there are several comforts I am readily willing to give up for the experience of it all. I am willing to go without regular meals, comfortable beds, showers, and even, at times, a clean pair of socks. All these things and more I readily gave up this past summer when backpacking through Europe. Here in England, however, we have stopped traveling; we have settled, and therefore there are a few homely comforts that I feel obliged to have.

As my darling wife has already noted, being a male I am not one to bring with me small sentimental treasures and brought only a few books on this journey as luxury items. I did however anticipate being able to enjoy other homely things while living over here. I anticipated having what seem like basic needs of survival in this day and age, namely, a television and the internet. I pictured a life in which I could watch my favourite American television shows – not to mention strange new British ones – and expend several hours a day at my other favourite pastime – reading random articles on the Sports Illustrated website. I admit the thought of trying to sign up for these services did trouble me a bit before this adventure began. In Canada I can think of at least three cable and four internet providers with no difficulty at all. But just like going to the grocery store, in Britain I would be somewhat lost. Still, I couldn’t have anticipated the trouble we have had in obtaining these minor entertainments.

Firstly, our fully furnished apartment does not come equipped with a television set. Despite promises from Rav that he would provide one, no television has appeared. Even if we had a television however, in Britain one cannot just plug a TV in and turn it on – a license must be purchased. This license, which costs about three hundred Canadian dollars a year, gives you access to about six channels, four of which are BBC channels (read: CBC but with better programming and no commercials). To get more channels, including those that would broadcast our favourite shows, we would have to hookup another service, the most popular being SkyTV which offers packages of channels ranging from fifteen to forty-five pounds per month. All of this, however, is quite a mute point, since we don’t even have a television in the first place.

Denied of this comfort I turned to internet. After an extensive search I found several providers, all of whom offered some sort of broadband connection at a top speed of 16 mega bits per second. Now I’m not an IT guy by any stretch of the imagination, but it strikes me that in Canada we were able to get at least 100 mega bits per second, but maybe I am mistaken. Despite the speed problems, we wanted internet and so thought we’d go with the fastest provider, again the all-reaching, all-consuming Sky, which offered internet and TV for just 25 pounds a month. There was a problem though – other than the fact we had no TV – we didn’t have a phone line. We called up British telecom (read Bell Canada but with even less organization) and found much to our horror that just renting a BT line and paying for each call separately would be a further eleven pounds a month. On top of that our apartment, for some reason, had never had a phone line installed in it which meant that we would have to pay a further three hundred Canadian dollars just to install a line. Being that we had rent to pay and that the school year was still a ways off this would have been a large hit on our finances. Although internet was also available through a cable line, just like in Canada, this service wasn’t available in Birmingham, which one may note is England’s second city, so where it is available we are not quite sure.

No worries, we thought, we’d wait for internet and just use the free service at the library and search for wireless hotspots around town where we could use our laptop a couple of times a week. Unlike in Canada, however, hotspots are not readily available in Britain. Correction – I should say that they are readily available but they are never free. No, I’m not just talking about having to buy a coffee or a beer – the hotspots here are actually locked operations that you have to sign onto after buying time for prices that are upwards of five pounds an hour. We discovered this when we went into the Starbucks in the city centre that advertised itself as a wireless hotspot and tried to log on. Oh well, Jenn was able to enjoy a delicious, if overpriced, iced mocha.

Having nearly given up on internet therefore we were surprised to pass a sign in the square in front of the library that said, “Free Wifi Spot”. Now I should mention this was no ordinary square, it was in fact one of the concrete areas covered with enough sand and deck chairs to call itself a beach that Jenn has mentioned before. Now you might think beaches are common in Britain and you would be right, but not in Birmingham. In fact Birmingham is in the very heart of the country, as far away from a coast as possible, and has no river but merely a manmade canal. This beach, one of several in the city, is no where near the canal and is erected each summer for the enjoyment of the local children who, being so far from a coast, may not have known how much fun a real beach could be, we supposed. Anyways what did we care, the internet was in fact free and there was a giant television screen broadcasting the BBC, and it all felt like home, well, sort of.

So cheers from the beach of Birmingham, where we sit with others crunched over our laptop, jackets done up to our throats, as we try to enjoy Britain’s summer.