The Tower of Babel: Where the EU falls a little short

Congratulations to the European Union for uniting so many countries and making so many things so much easier. One currency does make things a good deal easier. And it sure saves a lot of time when you don't have to go through any kind of border crossing ordeal when going from one country to another. But honestly, there is still a ways to go.

Let's start with the computer keyboard. Just when you start getting used to the fact that the Y is where the Z should be while in Germany, you fly to Spain, where those letters are back to where they should be. Of course, it's anyone's guess as to where the semicolon, hyphen, apostrophe, @ sign, and quotation marks will end up. Of course, if you haven't figured out what the "Alt Gr" key does, you might as well stay home, because you won't be able to type an e-mail address without it.

Then you might be lucky enough to find a computer at an internet cafe that has the handy little language bar that lets you choose which kind of keyboard mapping you want to use. Of course, by then, your fingers will be trained to use the keyboard layout of your current country (rather than your home country), so you're in a broken state once again.

Frustrating as issues with keyboards may be, the phone problem is guaranteed to be more expensive. Let's just say that I'd recommend doing some homework before buying a phone... and trusting cellphone salespeople only as far as you can throw them, regardless of how nice they are.

After the loss of my iPhone at the Brisbane airport, I picked up a cheap one at Bartells in Seattle for $18. The bad news was that it wouldn't work internationally, which I didn't realize until a couple of days before I left for Europe.

It was then that I bought cellphone #2, for $40, at the AT&T store in Seattle. I was told (and the box said) that the phone would work internationally. Additionally, AT&T will give you an unlock code for your cellphone if you tell them that you're travelling internationally. (At least, they would do this for me with my plan; your mileage may vary). Note to self: it will take them 3-5 business days to e-mail you this code. Apparently the wizards who cook up these codes can't be rushed.

But alas, upon touching down in Frankfurt, the cellphone claimed to have "no service" once turned on. A call to AT&T (on a land line) confirmed that my phone would work in some countries, but not in Europe, as it did not support the frequencies commonly used in Europe. Which baffles me, because my understanding is that there are two groups of frequencies (900/1800 vs 850/1900). So an "international" phone should support both, no?

I found a shop in Freiburg that advertised "lock-frei handys" for 19 € and decided to check them out. Since this shop also happened to house the internet cafe that I had been frequenting for a few days and I liked the (Turkish) proprietor, I took his word when he said that the phone I was buying for 35€ (yes, that's the 3rd phone I was buying in a month's time) would indeed be able to handle a different SIM card when I reached Spain.

But of course that wasn't the case. The phone did work in both Germany and Spain, but there were some issues in Spain... it was taking text messages days to get to recipients and sometimes calls simply wouldn't go through. And there wasn't any way I could figure out to "recharge" the SIM card with more money.

So yesterday I went in search of phone #4. It turns out that Orange, one of the cellphone carriers in Spain in our neighborhood, doesn't sell "libre" phones, but I did find a (questionable-looking) shop in the neighborhood of our escuela that sold one for 49€. And it turns out that the friendly internet cafe next door to the school sells SIM cards with favorable rates to the U.S. (around 15 cents per minute). And so far, the SIM card and phone are getting along very well.

Every time I was faced with the proposition of buying Yet Another Phone, I tried to reason that I didn't really need one (civilization survived for centuries without them) to avoid the purchase, but it seems that they're so pervasive in our society that it's hard to survive without one now. And besides, when travelling alone on a bike in a foreign country, it just seems like a good idea, should anything go wrong or a hotel need to be called...

So, anyway, back to the point about standardization... if Europe could have phone service that worked across borders, that would have saved me the purchase of Yet Another Phone.

And of course, the biggest request of all for the EU would be a standard language. It's unfortunate that mankind built that tower of Babel and ticked off God enough that he forced people to speak different languages scattered around the world. Because I guess if we all spoke the same language, we could accomplish some pretty amazing things (both in the discipline of tower-building and elsewhere). And I would be able to figure out how the heck to climb Mulhaçen.

But in the meantime I suppose I'll content myself with being a student of Spanish in Granada!