Instant chat around the globe

My older daughter Natalie is in India for a 6 week 12-credit college program to study culture, politics, religion and history. If it is 8 am here and I'm eating my oatmeal and rice milk, Bangalore is 9 1/2 hours later and Natalie is getting hungry for curry dinner. What is astonishing to me is that we can IM each other and--bam--just like that our words zoom halfway across the globe. We tried to Skype but the connection isn't really strong enough to maintain video phone calls. She sends me photos and journal entries, I'm turning them into a book, and being a designer, well, I'm starting to art direct her. More monkey photos please and a few more of the jasmine blossoms too. She tells me the locals laugh at them when they take pictures of the monkeys perched on roads and temples, they laugh in the same way she laughs at tourists snapping squirrels in New York. I love that I can get her photos and reactions so quickly. A postcard from India takes at least a week to travel. Thanks to the internet and laptops and digital cameras the world really is closer.