Laptop & internet access, staying connected with folks back home

We used email and a blog to keep in touch with our family and friends while we were away. Given all the time differences, and the challenges we assumed we would have with making phone calls, we just stuck with email. We did have rather limited and slow network access (not to mention our laptop "malfunctioned"), so we were not able to blog and upload nearly as often as we wanted to, and unable to upload many photos at all - so much of this we wrote with good old fashioned "pen to paper". That is, quite frankly, why this blog was written 'post adoption'. (It's taken me so long to get it published because, as you can imagine, we've have had other adorable priorities!)

We brought our laptop, and we certainly used it while it worked. You will of course need converters and adapter. After about 2 weeks we had trouble with it, so we were without it much of the trip. After we got back home to the U.S. we figured out finally the problem was that the battery was not recharging (the electric is different/hotter/stronger voltage there); all we would have had to do was remove the battery and the laptop would have worked the remainder of our trip! Oh well, live and learn.

Telephone calls from the hotels seemed to be a bit of a challenge, so we opted to simply use the “internet café”. Had our laptop not gone caput on us, it would have been worth sorting out the Nursat card thing. The internet café was really is more of a computer store and computer training facility, but Pasha and at least one of the other guys there on staff have a little bit of English, so it worked out ok. (As I recall it was 200-300 tenge per hour.) We did have a few problems with unexpected closures of the ‘café’, and of very slow access. That said, the Peace Corp volunteer there that we talked to didn’t think we would do much better elsewhere. Sorting out dial access from the hotels would have probably been worthwhile, had our laptop held out.

We used a flash drive to transfer things from our laptop- well that is while our laptop worked, but that’s another story - to a PC there at the café, in that way we didn’t have to carry the laptop around. Worked out well for us. Also, by using one of the PCs at the internet cafe we were able to transfer/copy photos to the flash drive as a ‘backup’ to the camera memory cards, just in case something happened to the camera. These pictures are some of the most precious that we have! Took a bit of guesswork and playing around initially as all the icons are in Russian, but didn’t take long to get it to work.