10/27/2007

"Ring the Alarm" (by Beyonce)

Now cell phone subscribers are over 100 million out of 127 million in Japan, and over 2 billion out of 6 billion in the world. I'm not the only one who gave up installing a fixed line telephone at my home several years ago. At the same time, payphone has been disappeared from the streets. But, I haven't felt inconvenient until my last visit to Chicago in the early this month.

As always, I didn't rent a cell phone at the airport. Although I had to make several phone calls this time, I assumed I could find a payphone on the streets. But, the first problem was that I couldn't find one! Secondly, almost no Chicagoans knew where a public phone was!! What is worse, even when I found one at last, I didn't have quarters and couldn't find places for exchanges!!! Later, I bought a $2 phone card, but wasn't able to make local calls for long enough!!!!

So, when you travel overseas:

  1. Get dozens of quarters,
  2. Rent a cell phone,
  3. Find a nice person you might be able to borrow his/her cell phone from (Thanks a lot to a girl, at a Dunkin' Doughnut store, who let me use her Razr for free.), OR
  4. Just give up making a phone calls (I don't like making a phone call partly because I have traumatic work experiences at a call center.) and be free from digital connection.

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