The storm is about to break. How about a diversion?

How’s the Internet in China? How’s the connection? Do we have a cell phone? Laptop? Wi-fi? Up for a semi-technical discussion before there is no time for such a thing? Read on..We knew that the Internet is a little different here. There is no Facebook, and no Youtube. We can survive without those, so no big deal. I decided to bring a fair bit of technology and hope for the best.

We read differing accounts of in-room Internet access. We thought we might not even have Internet access here in Taiyuan. Clearly, and thankfully, we were wrong. In both Beijing and Taiyuan, we have just an ethernet cable, and really only one available plug, a 220V Chinese plug, of course. So, how do we power our gear and connect two phones, a laptop and a tablet?

• plug converters: These don’t change the voltage, basically just the shape of the plug. US electronics expect 120V outlets, but most of our stuff can handle anywhere from 110V to 240V, so we can use just a simple plug converter. If we also had to convert the voltage, that would be a much bigger deal, and we’d be much more limited in how much stuff we could plug in.
• travel power strip: with one available plug in Taiyuan, and a bajillion devices, this is a must
• tiny little wireless router: we just plug in the hotel-provided ethernet cable, and we have Internet for everything else. Even better, it’s powered by USB. This is kind of the crux of it all.
• lots of USB wall warts and cables: all these devices came with USB for power, so now they all have interchangeable power
• x-mini speakers: a pair of small but mighty, battery powered, rechargeable (by USB, of course) speakers. They daisy chain together for more sound and stereo. I’ve been connecting them to my phone and playing whatever we like. I think there’s even some kids music on here..

In Beijing, using the Internet was a bit painful, since we pretty much had to hit refresh 10 times to get anything. Here in Taiyuan, that’s not the case. Blocked websites just hang, but everything else pops right up on the first try. To test things, I downloaded a game to the tablet (the Humble Bundle for Android is on right now, just sayin’..), and it worked fine, but it was very slow. A 40 MB game took about 10 minutes to download. But it worked.

Some good friends lent us a cell phone to use in China, but we’ve found that since Wi-Fi is so easy to use, we haven’t bought a SIM card, and we haven’t missed it.

Irrelevance managed. We’re picking up Alexander in about an hour and a half. Here we go…