The Electronics

Boyfriend and I are currently in a tiny speck of Germany where there are people, running water, electricity, telephone line and satellite dishes but no cell phone reception. We're also staying in a small B&B where no wireless internet is offered to guests.

It's a place where you can get away from it all. It's so far from civilization, it has its own fire corps, because the town could burn down in the time it'd take for the bigger cities to get a fire truck or chopper over there. It's that small and that remote.

My family has been going there for years, so we're used to it. Boyfriend isn't, so he spent a large part of last week wondering how he'd survive without 'contact to the outside world'.

At the time of writing this (last week), I'm trying to stick of the principle of one cell phone and one electronic, handheld gaming platform. He can have his PSP or his Nintendo, but not both.

I'm sticking to this, because in the past few years, arguments have mainly been about people refusing to partake in family activities, such as a drink with the family at night or a walk or visit to a town with, y'know, shops and swimming pools and ice cream parlors and cell phone reception, in favor of gimmicks. We know we can survive a week without it because, quite simply, we have before. We don't go there to watch DVDs on a portable player or beat the final boss in some platform game. We go there because it's peaceful and beautiful and our family has done it for two or three generations.

And we're not cut off from civilization. We go places, we visit things, we run into a surprising amount of people we can talk to. We just don't have our own kitchen to cook in or a computer to spend hours chatting on. When cell phones came into our lives, we could form small groups and do seperate things. An uncle could go to a town and visit a war museum while his wife and her sisters took the kids to the pool and the rest of the guys went hiking, but we could all meet up around the same time in a café for lunch without someone calling mountain rescue because one group was late. Or we could call to those who stayed home, once a day. It's expensive to actually call, and I think that's a good thing. If they miss us, they should come along.

My dad briefly entertained the option of taking a laptop and buying German internet access, but it failed. I'm secretly glad. I took my laptop the last few years because I simply couldn't walk without agony, which limited my activities somewhat and I needed stuff to keep boredom at bay. I'm better now and I want to go places. I didn't miss my internet. To be honest, I mostly read on it and played simulations of games for smaller, handheld consoles.

So I'm torturing the love of my life in favor of tradition and the old-world idea of some time to oneself. But he can have one console. We do have a six hour train ride after all.