I feel bereft, without a netbook to be called my own, and spending the next month travelling around all of Mexico. My last Acer Aspire One broke while I hamfistedly tried to upgrade its RAM, so I am forced to write longhand using a pen in a book with old school hand writing, and then to transcribe these scribbles via the medium of the internet. The shame, the shame.

Yesterday, I thought my luck was in. I had found Office Depot, PC World Wannabe. But my slippery and incoherent grasp of spanish has really driven home the issues of communication. Armed with just a few words, web site navigation and structure becomes excruciatingly important. The "our shops" section of the Office Depot web site lists all their shops. But I´m not sure exactly how. And the addresses seem to be different to the maps. And Google Maps doesn´t recognise the postcodes...

With a couple of what I thought to be addresses tucked safely in my (paper) notebook, I set out with a friend to a location in the southern suburbs of Mexico City, near Xola. But the shop wasn´t, it was a secondary school. Undeterred, we set out to find the next store, on the longest street in Mexico, armed this time with a dyslexically written down number. Four miles, an electrical storm, a roundabout ride in a green and white VW beetle taxi later, we arrived at the store. Only to be told that they didn´t have any Acer Aspire Ones in stock, and they wouldn´t have any until next week.

Next stop, Guadalajara, and I will endeavour to phone them up before arriving and check if they´re in stock. Well, at least I managed to buy some socks...