The Cyber

            Two dirhams an hour to use the internet is a good deal.  The closest internet café is only ten minutes from your house and the walk is generally pleasant.  Recently though the rain has made this otherwise enjoyable trip less and less convenient.  The reasons for this are two-fold. 

For one thing, you have yet to procure an umbrella and therefore must settle for walking without one.  Obviously, the extent to which this is a problem varies with the weather.  Usually if you leave your house during a drizzle, you will walk home in a similar drizzle.  But from time to time it happens that you venture out into a small shower only to later find yourself trapped inside the cyber watching the onslaught of tiny water droplets as they barrage the street outside, wondering to yourself if it will ever ease up enough to make it back home.  Eventually it does.

            The second problem is that more often than not the rain will cause the power to go out in the entire village.  This, of course, is a massive problem if you are using one of the computers that are provided.  But even if you have brought your own laptop, the power outage relegates you to working offline, something you could easily do anywhere else in greater comfort and at less expense.  And even this is only possible until your battery runs out.

            So what do you do?  Occasionally you will practice your broken Darija with your fellow café goers, but these conversations can only last so long.  You look through over one hundred gigs of music and end up playing one of the regulars.  You play Hearts and lose.  You play Minesweeper and blow up.  You stand by the window and look at the wet, gray sky, wondering what the weather is like in other parts of the world.  Eventually though, you decide to make lemonade of lemons; you settle back down into your seat, open a fresh Word document, and start writing your next blog entry.