Making Mobile Calls While Traveling - Without Selling The House

I am currently making plans for my next trip, to Greece.  Since I will be doing the accommodation reservations on the go, there will be more phone calls than usual when travelling. Yet when I checked the roaming call rates of my cellular provider (Orange), I was in for a surprise - above 11 NIS/min for calls inside Greece and 20 NIS/min to Israel (10.2 with a "Global Savings" program). 

Since I don't intend the phone bill to be more expensive than the flight ticket, I went looking for a better option. The short version is that getting a SIM card with the SIM 014 program by Bezeq International seems to give the best rates (2.09 NIS/min in Greece), with 013SIM by 013 Netvision being a good alternative.

Generally there are two kinds of products for international mobile calls - Pre-Paid and Post-Paid. 

Pre-Paid means you are buying a "calling card" ahead of time, charged with a certain amount of "units" or sum of money. You use a special number when calling and the card number, until you've run out of credit, and need to buy another card, or charge your account with additional sum. The advantage here is the control over your spending, since you can never pay more then the value of the card. But I don't like the more difficult process of making the call, and that you can run out of credit in the middle of a conversation. Also, you have to commit ahead of time to a certain amount of call minutes, and even if you don't use them all they expire after a while.

Post-Paid means you pay per-usage with your credit card. You buy a new SIM card (a one time charge) and just use it normally - including storing your contact numbers on it, etc. With many programs, you can buy an international SIM card once, and use it for years, from many countries. I like the simplicity of this.

There's a good article (by kamaze.co.il) comparing the different services offered in Israel. I made a online spreadsheet which summarizes the ones I liked, and compared the initial price and the calling rates from several countries which I am planning to visit in the future. Another option which is not included is buying a local Greek SIM card, which might have a little lower initial price and rates, but will only be useful inside Greece and I won't be able to use it in later trips.

In the end, the SIM 013 has the lowest initial price, but  SIM 014 program by Bezeq International has the best rates and over time will be cheaper. 

What Are You Collecting?

I've been thinking recently about stuff we tend to accumulate over time.

My father for example is quite the handyman in the house - he can fix a door, lay a cable across the apartment, fix an electrical appliance, etc. Over the years, he gathered a variety of tools and accessories for different tasks, and he always has the right one for the job as well as the skill to use it correctly.

My mother has a sewing machine, and when she has the time, can make a nice piece of clothing or fix one, or perhaps make some pretty pillow covers for the living room. And she got, stored around the house, various fabrics, magazine cutouts with designs, threads, buttons and all the other accessories.

Why am I writing this? I've just been upgrading my computer and as always, as I was preparing to put in the new parts, I got out a big storage box. There, I got a variety of parts, cables, connectors, power adapters and many other components I have accumulated over the last 15 years or more, from every computer I assembled for myself or relatives, every gadget or piece of electronics bought. And it does come very handy at times, when you need to replace a broken CPU fan, test if some component is faulty by putting another one instead, or even when you just need a rather weird type of screw for the computer case.

What do you have gathering dust in some storage box?