A little shock

This morning we went into Norwich to check out the mobile connect, which you may remember suddenly stopped working in Switzerland. We’d been a bit concerned at the time that maybe it was chewing through the costs, and that we’d get a large bill, so I was also rather screwing up my courage in terms of how much it was going to cost. I hadn’t been able to get Vodafone to respond by cellphone or email to my request for assistance in this area while we were in Europe.

The guy in Vodafone Norwich looked up the number on the screen and said, There’s nothing wrong with it. A credit bar has come up because there was concern that someone was using it illegally. Because there was so much owing on it.

Like how much?

£969.

Yup, you read that right. That’s $2618.29 in NZ dollars at today’s exchange rates. Yet we’d been using the Internet in Barcelona for a euro an hour!

I got shivers up and down my spine and spoke to the customer service people at Vodafone on the assistant’s cellphone. It didn’t help. That was the bill, the girl said.

The assistant asked if I knew about an alternative way of using the mobile connect on the Continent. In that case you paid £111 and could download 200 megs. That would have been better, although we’d managed to get through 200 plus megs in the times I’d been using the thing.

We went home in a state of shock. Literally. Celia was in tears, as you might expect, and I didn’t know what to say at all. The only thing that the assistant had recommended was to ring Vodafone back again and get hold of a Team Leader, as they were sometimes able to do something about such unexpected bills.

I had some lunch, though had some difficulty downing it, and finally rang Vodafone and asked for a Team Leader. They told me one would be available to ring me back in about an hour, so I thanked them, and hoped I wouldn’t be waiting too long.

Tried to do other things, without much success. And then the phone rang. Before I could say anything much the guy announced who he was and that he was putting a credit through for the £969 and he was charging out each 24 hours at $8.50 a time and that the bill would come to $59 or thereabouts, plus the usual monthly charge.

I was almost too stunned to thank him. Not only having the gift of such a large amount rescinded but to have it done without me even asking for it was extraordinary.

There was sudden rejoicing amongst the Crowls. And on top of that, a short while after Celia unexpectedly found the connection to one of the innumerable electronic toys she plays with which a long search yesterday had convinced us was lost. We’d gone to Norwich this morning to get a replacement for it, but had forgotten all about it in the stress of the moment…

Rethink and Rules

The Metro in Valencia isn’t just a tram. It’s also an underground. Ah, well, we’ll get it right eventually.
The Spanish don’t seem to have a sense of personal space: they’ll bump into you in the street and make no comment, and if you ask them something, they’ll often seem to ignore you. On the other hand, when they do respond, they’re just lovely and friendly. Well, apart from the bus driver we got last night, who wouldn’t let two old people off the bus (he’d missed opening the door for them) until they shouted at him - and then he wouldn’t let a woman on at the same place! There have to be exceptions everywhere, I guess.

I’m going to start compiling a list of tourist ‘rules.’

1. If you see a toilet, use it, even if you don’t want to go at that point. Toilets are hard to come by. (Curiously, toilets in Spain are called the WC.)
2. Words like ‘hola!’ in Spain, ‘prego’ in Italy, and ‘bitte’ in Germany may mean anything the speaker wants them to mean. But they’re handy words, all the same.
3. It is inevitable that you will lose things while travelling. Don’t fuss. So far we’ve lost the cover to Celia’s knife, maybe even the knife itself, possibly a pair of my underpants, a piece off Celia’s Swiss Army Knife, and maybe some things we haven’t noticed so far. I got all the way home today before I noticed I’d left my jersey somewhere - probably in a café where I stopped for a cup of very milky coffee. Trouble is, I probably can’t find the place again - I got completely lost on the way home as it was.
4. The main thing is, Don’t lose each other. And be nice to each other - this makes a big difference under stress.
5. Never assume that you know everything about the city just because you’ve found your way from the railway station to your place of abode. Usually the city is a hundred times bigger than you thought.

The picture is of a toilet in Spain - not one we've used though.