onion routing

Hey all, I was wondering if any of you have experience with onion routing? I've got tor with privoxy running with mozilla firefox. I have noticed that when running it, it has seriously impacting the speed in which internet pages load. A page that typically is instantly up now takes a few seconds and a video clip that typically took only a few seconds to load now can take *0 seconds to a minute. Is this to be expected?

Also, when I check my ip, it'll periodically show a difffernet ip address. Sometimes it tells me I am in the US, others I am in Germany or Tiawan. Should my ip be masked or is this natural? I guess I expected no ip to display while running these programs, what do you think?