pulling teeth

I'm down at home in waterford for the long weekend here, so I'm back in dial-up land. Man, it's like pulling teeth! I've gone from a 3Mb broadband connection in my flat in dublin to a 56k modem connection down here - and it never even connects at 56k, most of the time it dials in at about 42k. I've forgotten what it's like to have to wait as much as a couple of minutes for each page to load. Some sites (like vodafone.ie) I even have to turn off images on 'cos otherwise it just takes too damn long! Sometims living in the city does have its advantages......