Cybercentres in the Vendee

ANGELA BIRD'S

CYBERCENTRES

Sad though it is, sometimes on holiday
you just have to keep up with the real world...

HOT NEWS ON HOT-SPOTS 2008

The Vendée county council has just issued a list of wi-fi hotspots in all the main tourist areas, coming on stream in July, August and thereafter.

It seems that you will be able to check out touristic sites related to the Vendée from these
points freely, but if you want to log onto your emails and have
complete access to the Web you will be required to pay 1 euro for a 24-hour period.

You sign up to pay this on line; if you have problems, try asking the local tourist office,
who seem to be the focus of most of the connections anyway.

If you do not have your own wi-fi-enabled laptop with you, these are also the
people to contact to find the nearest cybercentre, where you can use somebody else’s
computer to do your surfing and emailing at a cost of about 2 euros an hour.

If you do not have access to a telephone line in your gite, caravan or campsite there are more and more cybercentres in the Vendée where you should be able to pick up mail, do a spot of websurfing and so on. (Some of the top-grade, four-star campsites do offer these facilities to its clients, too - worth checking before you go off looking for somewhere else.) It usually costs 1 or 1.5 euro just to pick up a few emails.

Before you take off on holiday, make sure you know whether your UK internet service provider has a “webmail” facility (so you can collect your mail from another dial-up connection). Otherwise you could set up a Hotmail account and arrange, before leaving home, to forward all your mail to that so that you can pick it up easily.
If you are going to set up your own connection via your laptop, you will need also to find out the international dial-up number for your ISP. (The one you use back home will not work from abroad.)

Here is a French government website that lists “médiathèques” throughout France where you might be able to drop in and pick up emails, or do some surfing. Scroll down its introductory page, and click on the map of France, and then select the region you want (for the Vendée or Loire-Atlantique, this will be Pays de la Loire). Then pick a département (i.e. Vendée, 85). These establishments are really designed as centres where local residents can learn to use computers, so you might not always find a computer available.

Here is a link to the cybercentres of the Pays de la Loire region (which includes the Vendee). Anywhere with a postal code beginning with 85 is in the Vendee.

MACHÉ :
Maché Cybercentre
Open Mon-Sat 3-6pm (1-31 Aug, Mon-Fri 3-6pm)
10 rue du Calvaire
Tel : 02 51 55 64 60
6 PCs ADSL
UK four-way, so you can plug in the charger of your UK laptop while you work !

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