Challenges -- Vodafone: "Everything is Love"

I in my last update I forgot to mention some of the things that have been more interesting or challenging so far. Apart from my shopping for groceries taking two hours (-- how do you know which hair product does what when yo can't read the labels?!) -- my favorite example was my cell phone buying adventure:

I had decided to get a pre-paid cell phone in order to stay in touch with friends here and in order to be able to receive calls from home. Vodafone provides/sells pre-paid phones to customers in Japan regardless of immigration status. So far so go.

The first 3 Vodaphone stores i went to (there's quite a few of them), gave me differing explanations of why they would not sell me a phone. Then I went to the one where my German friends Vera had purchased hers. They seemed happy to sell me one, however there was a problem: while anyone can buy a phone, in theory, in practice your passport/national ID has to meet the Japanese standard, in the sense that your home country address has to be printed in it. That's not the case for most other countries, so, hours of flipping through passport pages followed, suggestions of writing the address into my passport on the page designated for accompanying children (-- I decided not to do that, in favor of keeping my passport valid for general traveling purposes...), calls to the internal "how-to" hotline & waiting. After the first 2 hours in the store, we were asked to come back in two hours. OK, after that and another two hours we were asked to come back tomorrow... That day we first waited two hours in the store, then were sent home again. At this point i was starting to wonder whether this was the Japanese polite way of telling us "no", by asking us to "come back tomorrow" every day. So, I decided to give them my e-mail address, so that they could notify me when the contract was ready, in order for everyone to be able to save face and in order not to spend 30% of my Tokyo time in a Vodafone store, listening to jingles by the J-Pop band "Dreams come True" promoting the latest MP3 playing wonder-keitai (cell phone).

But, true to the JP Vodafone slogan "Everything is Love", a miracle occurred and on the 4 day I eventually actually did get my phone... talk about cultural differences -- I remember having similar problems when I first moved to Seattle, where however things were resolved the American way: "As long as you give us more money (aka a $500) deposit, of course you can have a phone". :)

So, i am now the proud owner of a super-un-cool (to get the cool japanese tv-mp3-everyhting phones, you need a normal month to month contract), bright yellow, "pre-paido keitai denwa" , but hey it works and it even takes pictures and sends and receives e-mail! Should anyone feel the need to test it, you can reach me at (please convert this into a regular e-mail address, I'm posting the anti-spam version): maiken[dash]jpcell[at]moeller-hansen[dot]dk or + 81 (0)90 983 94 983

Hasta Luego! (hmm - wrong language -- never mind...)