I think that in quality management literature they are called “magic moments”. It's that point where the process meets the customer's expectations almost exactly.
My magic moment was sitting outside a Starbucks while finishing a plane booking online. A whole café table as my desk and on which I was able to layout my passport, note paper and credit card. The added bonus was that I did not have to drink what Starbucks passes up for coffee and nor did I have to pay for the privilege.
True all this was amongst the hurry of Chinese shoppers but they detracted not at all from the experience. In fact that ever changing landscape of women - mainly - with their booty in department store shopping bags and conversations with children, husbands or friends which did not distract because I was not attuned to the language, added to the experience.
And yes this was the experience that confirmed the correctness of my decision to buy an eeepc before I left Australia on a 5 month trip through China, Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East and India.
What attracted me initially was a combination of features. It has wireless and LAN connections, and an SD and three USB ports. In addition it has a reasonable word processor and spreadsheet program both of which are compatible with Word and Excel. All this for $AUD450.
But even more. It weighs just under a kilo and is sufficiently small that I can just drop it into by backpack and barely feel the additional weight as I wander the streets of whatever city I happen to be in.
But having listed all those positive attributes I had no real idea as to what I would do with the machine as I travelled. Certainly I would maintain my budget on it and possibly upload that to Google documents in anticipation of that time when I actually lost the machine!. I also had a number of other documents which in the past I would have carried as printouts but decided to just keep on the eeepc.
So it was in Beijing where I first realised how wonderful the machine actually was. Connectivity. In fact free connectivity.
I knew from past experience using a PDA that in some shopping centres it was possible to access wireless for free. Starbucks coffee shops are one example but there other several other wifi spots often quite close together.
Wireless in that part of China is generally so good that Skype connections work very well. So often I would go to Starbucks – or, rather, go near Starbucks - have a Skype conversation and then head off on the other parts of my travels.
Some tourist spots also have wireless. In Beijing one of these is the China Art Gallery.
The first spot I used it was on the top floor. Here I found a nice bench with a distant view over Beijing and little passing traffic.
From here I was able to email, Skype and of course update by budget on Google documents quite happily.
Whether this was a legitimate wireless hotspot I'm not sure but the coffee shop in the ground floor of the same Gallery also has free wireless and that is definitely available for the public.
I'd passed by there on my way through the Gallery and ultimately to the top floor. For some minutes I'd watched a lady performing a Japanese tea-ceremony. I had been interested in the ceremony itself but the greater part of my watching time had been spend musing on questions like – is this what happens if you order tea here? aren't the cups small? why is there no audience or even prospective consumers of the tea? and how long does this ceremony take [which was pertinent to my first question, given that in the main one has presumably come to the gallery to look at the works rather than to drink tea].
So I guess consumed by these important questions I had not initially noticed that this was now a wifi hot spot. Which in addition to tea serves up a reasonable cup of coffee [I'd had coffee here on a visit about a year before] .
I started to use this wireless connection for booking a plane trip to one of the towns I was to visit but just as I had nearly commenced the payment part of the process they indicated to me that the Gallery was about to close. Which led me back to the Starbucks mentioned above.
Next stop was Shanghai. Here was the first of several hotels that had a wired LAN connection in the room. All I had to do was find the cable, plug it into my eeepc and off I went. No need to even take the machine with me when I went out though often I did just in case I wanted to email or Skype or check something on the Internet as I went.
Incidentally I did not undertake my search for wireless the eeepc. For that I had another handy device. An O2 exec PDA which has amongst its attributes, wireless.
So as I walked along I would pull this out every so often, check if any wireless nodes appeared and if they did and if the environment was suitable I'd get out the eeepc. So my PDA was a sort of hunting dog.
After Shanghai, Kaifeng and Luoyang where again much to my delight there was a wired LAN connection in the room. Plug it in and off I went. No Starbucks here but it really didn't matter.
In Xian – the start or end of the Silk Road, home to the Terracotta Warriors [seeing them once is enough] and fashion capital of China and a much bigger city than the last two - there was no connection in the room. No matter, just up the road was a hostel. I found I could walk into their lounge area, connect to their wireless and even plug the machine into their mains if I wanted to. No questions asked and I did not even have to buy anything.
If that failed however or I was closer, I'd go to a department store which had – you guessed it – a Starbucks. One good one – yes, there are now several in Xian - had a bench seat inside the department store but adjacent to Starbucks. So I found I could rest the very light eeepc on my knees, check email and Skype away quite happily while the fashion conscious strutted by.
Moving further west into China, my next stop was Dunhuang – famed for Buddhist grottoes. Yes, they had a wired Lan connection but – a minor hiccough – it did not use DHCP so needed IP address details which the staff at reception could not provide.
I lost hope but – perhaps in response to my downhearted look they told to go to my room. Within 5 minutes a staff member came in and we set up the machine. He was almost apologetic that it needed this sort of intervention. And here I was all prepared to spend one or two dollars for an hour or more at a local Internet café.
I think it was here that I started to process some of my photos and upload them. I'm not sure why but before leaving home I'd had the foresight to download the Linux version of Picasa. I was able to select and do some minor enhancement of my photos and upload them to a website. So Buddha-like it was, meditating on those photos.
My last stop was Urumqi, almost the last large city in western China before one heads into Central Asia. For most a way station where you spend one night. I had four. The extras were “just-in-case” days. Just in case I had difficulty finding the man who had my ticket for my flight from Urumqi to Tashkent [instead of 10 minutes it took me about 2 hours to find him and then because of a misunderstanding I had to return the next day] and just in case the train into Urumqi was delayed by a dust-storm.
The hotel did not have a LAN connection and suggested I use a modem. The eeepc does not have a modem and anyway what would I have dialled up to? My provider was in Australia.
Off I went with PDA-pointer in hand and checked out wireless just in case. No networks revealed themselves so I was left with using a local Internet café [which would not be a problem at all. Internet cafés are often very well-equipped in China] or seeing if one of the department stores had wireless.
The Internet cafés were quite difficult to find, department stores don't really exist, but more importantly I could not find any wireless connection – secured or open. Until as I was coming back to my hotel one day I thought to try wireless connection on the street outside the hotel. And sure enough a few connections showed up. They were weak and even if they had worked it would have meant standing in the street emailing and skyping.
But inspired by this inkling of success when I returned to my room I started searching for a connection nearer the window and sure enough about 5 networks appeared and at least three of them were open.
I managed to connect to one or other of these during the rest of my stay in Urumqi. Working from a windowsill is difficult but after a while I achieved a reasonable ergonomic set-up by perching the eeepc on top of an upturned plastic rubbish bin with this in turn perched on the window sill. This allowed me to stand at the window and not have to bend my back.
With bin in place, curtain pulled in case of prying eyes I made my hotel bookings for upcoming visits to London, Madrid and Cairo.
Thanks eeepc [and Starbucks and all]
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