Ipad in europe

I have a Kindle Fire and an iPad. My husband mostly uses the latter. We stoke up on books and movies from Amazon before we go. In the past 2 years, no place we have stayed lacked Wi-Fi. That may be because I require it when looking for lodging. Email and web browsing have worked great for us everywhere EXCEPT in an expensive hotel at CDG on our last night in France. It was most frustrating, since we paid mega-Euros for it. I haven't tried the podcasts.

Linda, I was told that I couldn't download kindle books because we have a US amazon account and that when we're in Europe we would need an amazon.co.uk account to be able to download. This would also explain why our daughter couldn't download when she lived in Kenya.
I don't have the info about Rick's podcasts but couldn't you download them now for later?

I am in Austria, have an ipad with wireless and have a US itunes account. I download all the time from itunes over a wireless network no matter where I am in Europe.

I live in Germany and have a German and a US Amazon and Zinio account and in both cases I can download the respective content without any problems from anywhere in Germany.

I tend to load up my iPad and iPhone in advance so I don't have to worry about it once on the ground. In Paris I ended up using weak wifi in the park behind Notre Dame to download the Rick Steves audio tours. We were staying a building owned by a family friend, in a little garret type room, and while it was free and steps from Notre Dame, there was no wifi. You will probably have wifi, but why worry about it? I've also stayed in places that had wifi only to arrive and find out stuff like it was weak in my room, turned off after a certain time, or cost money. All on one trip! Maybe that was just bad luck, though.

I'm coming back home July 20 after 3 weeks in Italy. I decided to get an iPad and use a sim card with an old phone. I failed at streaming Amazon stuff but everything I had already downloaded played and my iTunes podcasts kept on coming. YouTube even plays here (Ligabue full albums - yeah!). The smaller the town, I found, the likelier of no or unreliable wi-fi. I learned to be attuned to the fact that I needed to reconnect with wi-fi frequently.
I'm going to use this system until something else comes up. Have a great (and greatly simplified) time!

This link from Amazon might clarify things with respect to the Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/m3vdkrs

Best to download the audio tours/podcasts while still at home. One less thing to have to worry about when you're traveling.

As suggested pre download everything you may want or need before you leave the U.S. I used pre loaded RS podcasts & his app all over without any issues. For amazon you do need another amazon account for each country to do so when there. You noticed those that did say they have an account for their country.
My family just returned from living overseas and this is what they had to do, too. I don't know if you have to be a resident of the country or not. Downloading in Europe will depend on the signal connection of the place where you stay or are using. Fellow travelers all said it was very slow and other days when it was tedious and absorbed too much of their time. Like we'd be having morning coffee and this entire time, they had to use it to do these things which was not as relaxing for some people but ok w/others.

Thanks for all the info,we are going to 5 countries and will see most of the museums and areas where Rick has podcasts. will the ipod or ipad hold this many podcasts? I don't mind downloading before I go as long as I have enough room on the device. the ipad has 16GB and my ipod says I have 5gGB available.Is this enough room. Will I have any left for books? Linda

Five giggle bites should be plenty for all the audio podcasts and several thousand pages of books too. It isn't how big your iPad is, it's how it is used. You don't say how much available space you have after all your apps and their data are loaded on. For example the Germany NavFree app takes nearly 2 giggle bites by itself.