Winning the battle

There are some moments in life when you feel yourself becoming an adult, living a life full of new experiences and taking those experiences, good or bad, in stride. Yesterday will forever be a day that will mark one step towards adulthood for Chantel.

I bought my first phone, all by myself.

Well, that’s not completely true. Lyndsay was there too. And we purchased said phones together, at a Vodafone store in Sevilla.

Phone plans in English are difficult to understand. Trying to figure out a phone plan in Spanish is like studying Japanese for a year and then realizing your final exam is in Turkish. It really just makes you want to throw the towel in.

Not to mention, it didn’t help that the woman who was helping us at the store was new. Every time we asked her a question, she had to call someone else over for us to talk to. But once person #2 left, person #1 would just sort of stare at us. Not that helpful.

But after an hour we victoriously walked out of the store carrying our two new phones. False, they’re models from the late 90’s. But we thought we had won the war, later to realize that was only our first battle.

After coming home, Lyndsay and I sat on our beds trying to figure out how to put the SIM card in the phone. Upon discovering that, we then struggled to put new contacts into our phones. And you can only imagine how difficult texting in Spanish is.

In retrospect, I should have never felt so accomplished to have put just three contacts into my phone. Because my three contacts were Lyndsay (my roommate), Chencha (my madre here), and Chencha casa (home number here). But I felt triumphant to see the fruit of my labors.

In closing, I would like to apologize to any adult that I have ever poked fun at for not understanding technology. I understand where you’re coming from now, and it’s not fun. Technology for ya’ll is a foreign language, and now I see it your way. (But only because it really IS in a foreign language).