Internet:

There are several options for you to receive your e-mail and connect to the Internet while in France. There are several Internet providers here in the US that offer connections in France. AOL, AT&T and Compuserve have access numbers that you would punch into your computer to connect while in France. These generally are what are called 'numero verts' which are our equivalents of 1-800 numbers. There are several things to consider about connecting this way: there are always surcharges of about 10 cents a minute that will be charged to your account, and there may be charges on your hotel bill you didn't anticipate. It's a good idea to first find out from your hotel if they have phone jacks to connect to and what they will charge you for the connection calls.

You can find an Internet cafe and pay the hourly amount to access the Internet to pick up and respond to your mail. You can use a service like Hotmail.com or Mail2Web.com which will request your password and e-mail address before presenting your e-mail. You will find that the French keyboards are AZERTY and not the QWERTY that you're used to. So when you type what you think will be an 'a' you will get a 'q' There aren't a great many differences - just enough to drive you crazy for a while. If you are a little aventurous you can turn the AZERTY keyboard into the familar QWERTY keyboard so that you can type freely without looking at where the letters are. To do this you would go into "panneau de configuration" on the start menu and then look for "clavier" which means keyboard. Then you click on "ajouter langue", meaning add language. When you find English US you can click on OK and you will wind up with an icon on the task bar. This icon looks like:Eng Fr and you click on the language you want. That keyboard will then be the active one. Don't forget to change it back to Fr when you leave!

You can go into any France Telecom office in France and subscribe to Wanadoo, the major Internet service provider. They will give you the CD to install into your laptop and start an account with you. They offer several options based around how many hours you anticipate you will need to access the Internet. They also offer an option that is like 'pay as you go' meaning that you pay for the time you use at the rate of about 30 cents a minute of connection time.
The problem is that if you're using the telephone lines of an older hotel you may be stuck with pulse dialing and have the slowest connection in the world. So even at 30 cents a minute your looking at $18 per hour. Well, you can find a nice Internet cafe that charges between 4$ and 8$ per hour. This is a heartbreak for us laptop purists because after all we brought our laptops to France to access the Internet, no? Actually I found out that I was paying the hotel rate for telephone calls and not Wanadoo's. Still, it's hard to beat an Internet cafe at $4 an hour.

Why not save the space in your suitcase by bringing a PalmPilot of some kind with you instead of a laptop? There are modems available for them and the whole package: modem, Palm, phone jack connecting lines; small keyboards and wall charger all fit into a package the size of a pack of cigarettes.

You can download a mail program and Internet browser to your desk top computer and then place those programs onto your Palm. A mail program like Eudora works great, but there are others like MultiMail, etc…Once you set up your connection parameters on the Palm, you dial in long distance to your US ISP, download the mail and disconnect. Then you can take your time in composing the responses, dialing up again and sending it. All told, you'll be on-line for one or two minutes. Pretty cheap way to go. If you have an ISP that has international access numbers you can see about dialing into them in the country where your are.

You must remember that if the phone in your hotel is rotary and not touch tone then you'll need to set that up on the Palm. Even though the phone in the hotel may look like a touch tone you will know for sure by trying to dial out. If you hear the old familiar sound of rotary dialing after each number pushed, the its really a rotary phone.

Still, in France there are so many Internet cafes that you would have to be way out in the sticks somewhere to need your own device for connecting to the Internet. I've been there and have greatly appreciated the convenience of picking up my email using the Palm.

Here is a web site that boasts a huge list of Internet cafes around the world: http://www.netcafeguide.com/

Problem is they recently discontinued the online access to internet cafes and you have to buy their book!

Here are some Internet cafes I found in Paris:

Cafe Orbital 13 rue Medicis 6eme 01 43 56 18 53
Putnik Internet Cafe 14-16 rue de la Buttes aux Cailles 13th
La Station Internet Rive Gauche France Telecom 37 rue Cherche Midi 6 eme 01 40 51 17 51

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