Orientation phase & cell phones
Written on January 19, 2008
On the last days I attended the universities orientation events for international student and new graduate students. I meat some nice people and got some valuable information. Although it was pretty boring most of the time it was worth it.
It’s pretty amazing what the university offers in comparison to a German university. The university has it’s own little clinic on the campus where students can see different doctors for free. We also can see a psychologist for free and get tutoring for writing, mathematics or whatever for free. For me it also was astonishing that the university has it’s own police station.
Getting to San Jose turned out to be less complicated and faster then I expected. It takes me between 50 and 90 minutes to get there using public transportation and my new 37$ bicycle which I got at target. I have no idea how it can be that they sell bicycles with 15 gears and aluminum frame for this price but so far I have no complains about it and am happy I got it.
Cause we forgot the cameras cable and my laptops incapability to read CF-cards I still can’t post any photos. Sorry. But I will work on this.
Meanwhile I want to complain about the ridiculously high cell phone prices in the US. Yesterday went to check some offers because I don’t have a contract in the US and Ana needs a new phone. The prices were that high that I only this morning understood that these prices are not for the year but per month! Apparently the lowest amount of shared free minutes you can get at Verizon (I just picked this one randomly I could have picked some competitor as well) is 700. First of all that’s WAY too much for me. I have no idea how people are supposed to ever use that up. But they want 69$/month. And that’s the smallest partner contract you can get. But even with this contract an additional minute costs you 0.45$. The biggest partner contract comes with 6000 minutes and costs 299$. And still you have to pay 0.2$ for every additional minute. Readers from the US might perceive this as normal but I did a quick comparison with O2 in Germany. There have apparently a contract where you don’t pay a basic fee but only the minutes you use. So I would expect a pretty high price for each minute. But it’s only 0.19 Euro per minute. That’s still comparable with the cheapest additional minutes at Verizon. And of course we have contract for 10-20Euro/month in Germany and these are not unusually cheap or tiny. So I am completely astonished and can’t believe that people in the US apparently are willing to pay prices like these.
