The other day I figured it might be nice to ring up my brother via Skype and ask if I was an uncle yet. So, after starting up the computer, plugging in the headphones and firing up Skype I just couldn’t figure out why the call button was greyed out. I had enough money on my Skype account and everything seemed to be in working order.

Then, as it has multiple times over the last few days, it struck me again. I have no Internet.

It hasn’t been all that long since I moved into my new apartment and if I want an Internet connection I have to pay for the full year in advance. Which is rather cheap admittedly, but I’ll wait for next months paycheck regardless. Buying dozens of pots and pans, odds and ends, gizmos and whatchamecallems doesn’t come all that cheap.

But this new disconnectedness has made me see being connected in a new – somewhat more negative – light. Because for all the fantastic benefits the Internet brings – live updates, bookings, wikipedia, Google, translation, networking, e-mail, movies, music – there is a price. And that price is time. Being online is something I would almost compare to a drug (not that I have any experience I hasten to add).

Every now and then it has you wondering: do I have new e-mail? (3 minutes) Is there something new on the BBC website? (5 minutes) Is that new movie out yet? (4 minutes) Oh, I like that song I’ll give that a download. (5 minutes) Ah, there’s someone talking to me on MSN. (10 minutes) Facebook has already been lost for quite a while so that already dropped from my routine. But still, add this up and you’re just short of 30 minutes. Do that twice a day and there goes a good chunk of your free time. Without really realising it I think it is (hopefully was) some sort of addiction for me.

But I’ll also admit it’s not easy to fill up the free time once it’s back. There’s no video stores in China (not to mention I don’t have a TV) because the whole video market here didn’t exist until Internet already existed so it’s all digital here, no thick newspapers with 60 odd pages (10 at most in English) and no English bookstores nearby.

So what do you do? Explore the neighbourhood, go shopping, cook food, picture-read magazines (Chinese National Geographic), eat sushi, go throw a frisbee in the park with Linda and buy a gun that blows bubbles and take pictures of it and in the same park with the same person buy a Chinese balloon and try to get it airborne only to have a security guard come and rip the thing to pieces without saying a single thing as to why (and the 2009 longest sentence award goes to…), write your diary, clean house, socialize, sleep early, study some Chinese, listen to music (and radio podcasts, love those things), Photoshop some pictures you want to develop and much, much more. It’s incredible the time that you’ve really got.

But I want my Internet back now.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll actually be able to upload this somewhere.