The Stairway to Love

Despite a name that sounds slightly disreputable in English, the Stairway to Love is our local and thoroughly respectable internet cafe. It is on the Third Ring Road, just to the right (north) of the West Campus of Beiwai (BFSU), a relatively short walk from our dorm . A sign outside displays a photo of a pizza and advertises "Free Internet." Above the actual stairway is a sign in cursive Roman alphabet displaying the "Stairway to Love" sign. The cafe features comfortable red armchairs, small tables and table lamps, and lots of electrical outlets, useful for recharging when your laptop battery goes out. There is an Internet room in our dormitory, run by an outside company that charges but is quite cheap as those places go - if I go there I usually spend about a dollar for my long session. But if you have a laptop, or you can share one with a friend, this is great. The Internet is free, but you are expected to order something to drink or eat. The food is excellent, and though the prices are close to western-level (for instance, a little less than two dollars - 15 yuan - for a bowl of creamy and slightly peppery potato-cucumber soup, as opposed to six yuan in the dining hall for a generous plate of rice and two meat/vegetable entrees) it's a treat. You can stay for quite a while if you wish, even without ordering additional food, and the wireless Internet itself really is free, and has excellent service. The Internet in my room is okay but goes out inexplicably from time to time, and is a lot slower.

I have had great experiences with Internet cafes in many cities; in Cuba, the local people cannot see cable television available in hotels, even like the Hotel Colina we stayed in a few years ago, although from what I've read they can rig up satellite TV. But tourists in Havana can walk a few blocks to the Havana Libre (formerly the Hilton) and visit an elegant hotel straight out of the fifties and for a dollar an hour use the Internet on the second floor. In Fez, in Morocco, this past winter, we went to an Internet cafe that was upstairs from a conventional cafe (usually we were the only women in the regular cafe downstairs, although some young women worked at or used the computers at the Internet cafe.) If I remember properly, that too was about a dollar an hour. In the winter of 2004 Granada, Nicaragua, had numerous bright new Internet cafes where you could get a cold drink or a cold beer and enjoy the welcome air conditioning while emailing. Those cafes in Nicaragua were much too expensive for almost all the local people, however, and we understood we were enjoying a luxury that only tourists and foreign students could afford.

The one place where there has been no Internet service within walking distance I've visited in the past several years: Great Pond, Maine, that I've mentioned as a summer vacation spot we've enjoyed for two years. For that we had to drive half an hour to an Internet cafe in Waterville.

We have chosen Stairway to Love as one of our favorite local spots! I am enjoying Coconut Milk Tea, which is a combination of tea, coconut milk, and large bubbles of black tapioca. In Naperville you can enjoy milk tea, sometimes called Bubble Tea at the Japanese restaurant Mochi Mochi near the corner of Main and Van Buren Sts., or at the interesting Pan-Asian restaurant Joy Yee Noodles (an offshoot of the Chinatown home base) on Ogden Avenue, in the shopping center just west of Iroquois Rd. The Xilin Center, which serves the local Asian population as well as other newcomers to the U.S. in the Naperville area, is in the same shopping center. My favorite bubble tea/milk tea at Joy Yee Noodles is sesame - a really ugly concoction but one that's delicious if you like sesame and tapioca bubbles. My friend Mary Lou Wehrli introduced me to it. The soups at Joy Yee sometimes look as though they were invented for the bar scene in Star Wars: slivered tentacles and odd-looking lumps that taste delicious but are pretty unrecognizable.

The photos above are (1) a photo I took from my seat at the cafe - you see my blog in progress- as an English prof I keep editing my old posts, but I have not adopted the blogger's code of using correction symbols to show edits - (I guess savvy bloggers use font color changes, or strikeouts, to show corrections - but I just edit and republish.) So you can read the blog about blogging and see blogging in progress, etc. etc. And the next (2) is of a Chinese student we have met at Beiwei who is studying German right now, and speaks excellent English. She joined in our taiji (tai chi) class one day, having just arrived that day - her birthday! - after a ten-hour trainride. She was working on her own blog.