AN ELEGY FOR THE INTERNET CAFÉ
LONG BEFORE TEXTING, TWITTER AND FACEBOOK, BLAND AND SMELLY ESTABLISHMENTS WERE A BRIDGE
Welcome to Internet Nostalgia Days, a celebration of the endless lives we have all lived online. There was a very thin window of time, more than a decade ago, when everyone had email but it wasn’t always easy to get online. I place it between maybe 2000 and 2004, before smartphones and widespread Wi-Fi access. Back then, if you weren’t at home or you didn’t own a computer, you had one reliable option for checking your Hotmail: the Internet café. It’s funny what an anachronism those seem today. The chairs were always terrible. Broken wheels. Torn polyester. Those awful levers that never cranked. But they were an oasis, too. In rural Romania one summer, I logged on in what seemed like a converted barn. I could barely speak over the music — the soundtrack to Mortal Kombat, the movie — and it smelled like Carpati cigarettes. But once I was online, ah, there it was: An inbox full of something very close to actual letters.
Before texting took over, before Gchat, and Facebook, email was more than a chore. It wasn’t just for phishing scams and professional check- ins. When you were travelling and you might only log on once a week, it was a perfect stopgap — the exact right balance between connected and not. The archives of my old Hotmail account are full of long back- and- forths from that era. But everything was contained. You could still be completely absorbed in a new place — lost and awash in the new — and then blissfully reconnected again, for 15- minute increments, in a bland, smelly café.
They looked alike, those cafés, no matter what continent they were on. They all had common traits. The clusters of teen boys playing first- person shooter games. The guy looking at porn. The bored, baggy- eyed staffers. The terrible snacks. I think I drank the same bad tea checking email in Vancouver that I did arranging flights in Belize.
There were exceptions, of course. In 2003, I turned 22 while staying in Transylvania. I remember logging on that week in what my memory suggests was an uncharacteristically bright, square room with computer-lined white walls. I was surly and ill. I’d eaten Mexican for dinner — not a smart plan in that part of the world. And I was lonely too. My girlfriend and I were tired of each other after weeks on the road. But when I opened my email everything brightened for a moment. There were messages from childhood buddies in Calgary, from my brothers and parents, and from my friends in British Columbia. Today, that kind of thing is taken for granted — it happens on every platform imaginable. But back then that sudden connection seemed genuinely touching and new.
Internet cafés still exist today, in odd pockets. But for several years, at least, Internet cafés were a bridge. They let you step back briefly into your own world at a time when that was much harder to do. Plus, they usually sold Twix.