It's one of those things that everyone has, and assumes will never disappear. But - as we have found this Christmas - sometimes the internet does disappear. It's not the internet - browsing, downloading British TV, comparing the altitude of Mount Sinai to Saint Catherine's Monastery - that we feel at a loss without but more the access it gives us to the world. And, by the world, I mean friends.
Email and Skype really are incredibly important to us out here, and so to find that the undersea cables were cut throughout the holiday season has meant that I have felt particularly "cut off" from the world. It's not really been such a big and terrible thing as communications were re-routed by the ISPs, but in those moments where you realise you're completely out of contact until a temporary fix is put in place it has been rather nerve-wracking as we both of course want to know we can call our folks when we feel like it - and not when the fickle nature of our current internet connection allows.
We do, of course, use the internet for other things. Such as looking up the altitude of Mount Sinai and working out how far we climbed from St Catherine's Monastery in the wee-small hours of New Year's Day (715m, by the way, to the peak at 2285m - two and a half times the height of Scafell Pike). Or downloading up-to-date British TV shows. Wasn't Wallace and Gromit brilliant?! Wasn't Dr Who terrible?!
Anyway, the point is that things are still flaky. According to Bloomberg, "internet and telephone traffic between the Middle East and Europe will continue to be disrupted until Jan. 4." That's because even though the first break in the main cable (caused by a ship's anchor) was fixed on Christmas Day, within just a few hours there was a second break on the cable a few hundred miles from the first following a suspected under-sea earthquake.
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