mamamusings: November 17, 2004

getting ready for greece

Haven’t been writing much this week because I’ve been swamped with end-of-quarter grading—alas, I’ll have to find an Internet cafe (or test out the international capability of our departmental AT&T dial-up accounts) in Athens this weekend to finish projects submitted on Thursday, but if I’ve got to grade, doing it in Athens beats doing it in Rochester!

We leave tomorrow afternoon, and will arrive in Athens at midday on Friday (Rochester to Dulles, Dulles to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Athens), and will stay in Athens through Sunday night. Monday morning we’ll be picked up early by George the famous taxi driver, who’ll be our guide for two days in Delphi and Meteora.

While I’m looking forward to Athens, I’m particularly excited about seeing Meteora and its famous monasteries. I’ve been collecting links with photos and descriptions over on del.icio.us, and I can’t shake the feeling that this is someplace that I’m somehow meant to see. Here’s a photo from one of the tourism sites:

I’m trying to convince my 8-year-old to blog the trip (the way Lane did when we went to Japan), but he’s reluctant. So I’ve set up a trip blog for all three of us (Alex, my mom, and myself) and we’ll be posting photos and narrative there. (The photos will be posted first on Flickr, of course, so you can keep an eye on that as well.)

is swapping sims really simple?

Okay, in preparation for the trip to Greece I started looking at cell phone options. The idiots at Cingular won’t let me use international roaming until I’ve had my phone for a year (what bozo thought up that policy??), so that won’t work—and would be prohibitive expensive, anyhow.

Via Matt Barrett’s incomparable Athens travel guide I found information about Greece Travel-Phones, which rents cell phones and will deliver them to your hotel—but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get one with a cameraphone and MMS messaging, which I’d really like (mostly so I can post camphone photos from Flickr while we tour).

A little more online poking around led me to think that the best option is to purchase a pre-paid SIM card in Greece and use it in my Motorola v400 quad-band GSM phone. I checked with Best Buy (where I purchased it), and they told me it’s unlocked—which is backed up by most of what I’ve seen on the online phone forums. I couldn’t find anyone with a SIM I could test it with, so I’ll have to take their word for it.

I sent email to the address provided for Greece Travel-Phones and got an immediate reply from the owner, who was extremely helpful. They do sell prepaid SIMS, and can deliver it directly to our hotel. He provided me with rates and options, and I was able to pay with PayPal. Yay! We’ll be able to receive calls on the phone for free (011-30-693-970-0752, if you want to chat while we’re there!), and outgoing calls, SMS, and MMS are reasonably priced. I bought it with €20 worth of credit, which I suspect will be plenty for what we need.

So…for those of you who travel internationally more than I do—is this likely to be a fairly simple process? Do I really just put the new SIM in and instantly have a Greek phone number? Are there any pitfalls I should know about? Any suggestions would be welcome, particularly if they’re sent before I leave at lunchtime tomorrow!