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Note: 2002

I'm leaving this page up for historic reasons, but, believe me, there is no other reason to care about 6-year-old information about cybercafes in Europe. There are now thousands of cybercafes in Europe and elsewhere.

The best current source on cybercafes I know is cybercaptive.com . If you know another good one, feel free to tell me and I will post the information here.

On the whole, as of 2002, cybercafes and the like are much more prevalent in Europe than in the US, because so many of the locals know how to use a computer but don't own one. This is especially true in cities that are simultaneously relatively poor and relatively large, such as Sevilla or Bucharest. By the way, in Bucharest, as of 2002, use of a computer should only cost you about US$1 an hour.

Cybercafes

In planning for this trip, I discovered that cybercafes are beginning to pop up in Europe as well as in the states. In researching this, I ran into some info I'd like to share.

A useful jumping-off point was a listing [2002: which is no longer at http://www.comcirc.com.au/biz/cafe/] which in turn points [2002: OK, "pointed"] to several well-maintained lists of cybercafes. Notable among what I found through this was Ciberteca in Madrid [no longer a cybercafe in 2002, more of an ISP/custom dev shop], Spain. If you speak/read Spanish, it looks [OK, looked] like a very good gateway into some of the Spanish-language (or, as they would have it castellano) portions of the Internet. Another excellent cybercafe, though pretty useless as a Web page, is Barcelona's Cafe del Internet. [As of 2002, their onetime URL - www.cafeinternet.es - is defunct. They lost their lease late in '01 as their building was being converted to a four-star hotel.] In the morning (they open 10 am), it's nearly all American and Canadian students taking advantage of Telnet when its the middle of the night in America.

As far as I can tell, the much rumored "Terminal Bar" in Prague is either history or fiction [and that was in 1996!]. There is a cybercafe there, although with limited (late afternoon, early evening) opening hours. I spotted it the last day I was there and (sorry) didn't make a not of its name or address, but it's not far from Wenceslaus Square, on the left side as you face the river (which you can't see!) with Wilsonova behind you.

Budapest has a great cybercafe, in a great location in the basement of a beautiful 19th century building, the Mucsarnok on the Heroes's Plaza. Cheap ( about US$3/hour) and with excellent equipment. [2002: Anyone know if this is still there? Write me at jmabel@speakeasy.org.]

The Cafe Stein in Vienna, 6-8 Wäringerstrasse, just outside the Ring, has a mere 4 terminals on a Unix system, almost no support, but a good high-speed connection, basically a tiny cyber-annex to an otherwise normal Vienna Cafe. [2002: Anyone know if this is still there? Write me at jmabel@speakeasy.org.]

Finally, in Berlin, on the Adenauer-Platz on Ku'damm, the Virtuality Cafe, mostly a bar where people go to put on headsets and play virtual reality games, has two Internet workstations. They don't open till 2pm. [2002: Anyone know if this is still there? Write me at jmabel@speakeasy.org.]

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First posted: August 1996
Last modified: April 5, 2002

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jmabel@speakeasy.org

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