> electricity is 230v 50hz

Universal 110-240 power supplies handle anything you are liable to meet.

> there are different keyboards in Europe. each language (and there are
many) has it's own keyboard, but mostly based on qwertz instead of qwerty.
the differences are only the language specific characters as well as some
signs (I use both, qwertz and qwerty. that's no problem)

There are more differences than you may wish for. Quite a lot of punctuation
goes to strange places - you end up sending home email with no punctuation
:-) (or wrong punctuation). The Germans have an extra function key to the
right of the space bar and add extra accented characters PLUS some standard
ones using it. I bought an HP laptop in Vienna, with German Windows thereon.
You get used to remembering where the unmarked characters are after a while.
Little things like     \ @ ~ / ; ~  etc have to be hunted down by trial and
much error at first :-).

In quite a few cafes the markings on the keyboard are getting a bit rubbed
off, which makes life interesting. In some cafes they have several different
types of keyboards in use at once. "Oh. You want a QWERTY PC - sorry,
they're all in use at the moment".

Be sure you have a means of charging camera etc batteries. We had a NiMH AA
fast charger (1.2 hours for 4 x 2000 mAh) which used 12v in so could be run
from a wall-wart, or in car with a suitable cord. Marvellous. Used a small
inverter to drive the camcorder charger. SOME inverters will not run some
laptops even though the power rating should be adequate. (Ask me how I
know).


        RM

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