Cell Phones in Argentina

    This is my new cell phone to use while here in Argentina! This is similar to the very first cell phone I ever had 9 years ago! It fits in my pocket, the battery lasts for probably 5 days, and it is much more durable than my smart phone. I've had to relearn how to text in T9, and my phone even has a game on it.
    It's really easy here to get cheap phones and pay as you go. I spent about $40 on this phone and the SIM card, and then I can pay for credit at little kiosks all around the city to prepay for minutes and messages.
    There are a few really popular service providers here. They are Claro, Movistar, and Personal. Our program bought all of our phones together to get a better price, so all of the students in my program have Personal too, and this makes it cheaper to talk to each other. I'm a little unclear about the whole system because its a lot of information to take in in Spanish, but as far as I understand, it's cheaper to text people on my same service, texts are cheaper than phone calls, and when I need to respond to a text, I should always create a new text instead of hit reply because it is cheaper this way. The credit that you put on your phone expires at the end of each month, too, so I need to guess how much I'll use.  I put 30 pesos of credit on my phone and have only needed to use it a few times so far, but hopefully this lasts me a while.
    I think it's cute that we all have matching phones in the program. I put the key chain on mine to differentiate it. I think technically I could access Facebook and other programs on this phone if I wanted to, but it would cost a ton and it's somewhat of a relief to not be using a phone all day. Since everyone in the program is with each other for a good part of the day anyway, there isn't really a need to be spending a bunch of time on our phones.