September 6th, 2017
It’s day three in Bilbao, and though the morning started off wonderfully (though not punctually, apparently my old American habits followed me here) the evening has been a little more stressful i.e. getting my cell phone to work in Spain. But let’s talk about the good news first!
I only spent half the day at the University of Deusto; more orientations. Most importantly, I received my class schedule. Imagine my horror when I saw that I had two 8:00 am classes. The only thing that helped was the knowledge that I have no classes on Monday until the late afternoon, so my weekend travels don’t have to end Sunday night.
Weekends in Paris, Rome, London, Zurich, Morocco, Lisbon…here I come!
Just kidding. I have to explore Bilbao sometimes too (and homework).
My command of the Spanish language, though flimsy at best, is slowly coming back to me thanks to those patient enough to remind me that I do, in fact, know Spanish. And with my increasing usage of the language comes an increasing amount of horrifying pronunciation errors.
Por ejemplo: The university is not ‘Duyesto’ with a ‘y’ sound but rather ‘Day-oo-sto’. Or ‘Getxo’ which is ‘Gay-cho’.
I’m not going to tell you how many times I’ve made those mistakes today.
But that’s hardly been the worst part of today. No, that honor belongs to my cell phone which stubbornly refuses to cooperate.
My entire plan is, once I arrived in Spain, to take advantage of the TravelPass (offered by Verizon for $10/day) until I could get a new SIM card. Shouldn’t have been difficult, but oh it was. First was the mere process of finding a store that sold them that didn’t seem shady. El Cortés Inglés has a good cell phone counter (one that took me an embarrassingly long time to find) but lo and behold you need your passport to purchase anything here.
Don’t ask me why or how or what. I’m just as confused as you are.
Once I had been informed by the lady that a picture of my passport wouldn’t work (whoops, mistook the word ‘picture’ for ‘painting’ in Spanish while asking her), I returned home to grab my passport and march right back to the store with an iron grip around the most important document I own…
Verizon has to unlock my iPhone first. Of course they do. I love Verizon’s support team though, I really do and believe me, they don’t pay me to say that. It took all of ten minutes to get everything sorted via a chat bar and I know I can head back El Cortés Inglés and return with my new SIM-ed iPhone in hand.
Jump forward to me returning to the store: I forgot to do an iCloud backup and I didn’t want to lose all of my photos from Bilbao. I put my phone in Spanish mode solely to show the employee what I meant, and she was so very kind to explain to me what to do at home after I did the iCloud backup on wifi.
Thankfully, I didn’t end up needing her instructions. With help of my technological-savvy host family, I popped the old card out, put the new one in and wallah! I now have 2 GB data to use for the low, low price of 20 euros.
All in a day’s work here in Spain!
Sarah
