August 25, 2004
Today I bought a cell phone, well, actually they are usually called mobile
phones here. This is a really neat phone, with a bunch of features I'll
probably never use. (I'm not going to let Curtis know that it has a game.)
All mobiles here appear to be a long distance call from landlines
in Cairo since they are in a different, "virtual" city code. But as in the US,
long distance from mobiles does not seem to be charged differently. One of the
first things I needed to set up on the phone was to use "Latin" characters
rather than Arabic so that I could understand the numbers I was putting into
the directory. Then I had an interesting time setting up voice mail. One of
the prompts in the Arabic/English automated system was to choose the language
and I am sure I pressed the 2 needed to choose English. However, everything
instead changed to just Arabic, and I could not understand what the prompts
were saying. I finally had to call up customer service from our landline and
hold my mobile up to the receiver so he could listen to the Arabic prompts
and tell me what to press to get the language changed to English.
My cool little phone.
