33 cents per M I N U T E

The whole phone thing over here is insane. We miss our family plan- no such thing here. We bought a used pay-as-you-go cell phone within a day of arriving here just for essential calling. It's about 25 cents a minute to use- not cheap.

In January when we had our Internet hooked up, we were also assigned a landline. Took us another month to get an actual phone plugged in {thanks, Laura} since US cordless phones are of no use here.

Hearing how expensive it is to use the phone here, I've been completely afraid to use it. After receiving our first bill, we realized they assigned us a long-distance telephone phone number. In our village, everyone has the same five numbers at the beginning- not us. I was just told that the phone company is now required to assign these new numbers and only gives a local number if the other {long distance} ones are taken. Sounds like a scam to me. Whatever.

Here, you never pay for incoming calls, but for us to call even our neighbors, it is a long-distance call. Ridiculous. Also in Germany, land lines and cell phones are two different things. For us to call another land line from our home phone, it is about 4 cents per minute. Using our same home phone to call a cell phone- a whopping 33 cents per minute.

Re-evaluating our phone contract, we did find a couple options we didn't know existed. I'm sure we were caught up in the shock of everything being new and different when we started the process, we never went back to read the small print. We were able to add unlimited calling to Germany for an additional $7 per month. At least I think it's unlimited- it says "it applies to calls for fixed network" whatever that means, I'm sure we'll quickly find out.

We also found out that we get free unlimited calls to the United States. How crazy is that? Long distance to call my neighbor, but free to anyone any time in the US? Don't get me wrong, we're excited- very excited. This has especially simplified making arrangements to get things done on our house in Kansas. Hearing a normal dial tone is more comforting and exciting than I anticipated. Hearing friends and family {especially those we haven't been able to talk to on Skype} is even better. 

Just another example of how different it is in the world we now live in.