people, nasti needs answers concerning her phone situation in madrid! help her!

calling around madrid is so expensive! calling home to the states is cheaper than making calls to mobiles around madrid and spain. i don´t have a phone in my house(i don´t want to shell out 200 euros to telefonica at the moment and auna isn´t available at my address)and can only make calls from my mobile and phone booths. since i don´t have a contract plan with vodafone, i just recharge my mobile 10 or 15 euros every so often. doing that, i could easily spend 200 euros a month, but i can´t afford that right now. i spend about 25 euros a week and pretty much just messages.

and my social is suffering! oh my f#€king god! i am such a flake flake calling people and if i can´t improve my phone situation, i´m seriously thinking about not coming back this fall.

using mobile phones here in Spain is very expensive, Nasti, as you have discovered. To help keep my mobile phone use in check, I always carry a telefonica card with me to use at the payphones, as well as a EUROCITY card to call to the states.

Text messaging is definitely cheaper than phone calls, but sometimes, if it takes two or three msgs to communicate what you could have communicated in a 1-2 min conversation, it would have been cheaper to make the call. When text msging make sure that your messages are to the point and you don´t have to exchange 3 or 4 of them to get the point across.

Social life is suffering? What about email? Could you communicate the same messages via email as you would text messages (meaning, is their instantaneous response so necessary?). All of these things are things that I have struggled with as I adapted to the horrendous phone charges here.

One final note, Vodafone is one of the most expensive carriers to call... particularly if your friends have telefonica/movistar.

Failure to get a grip on your mobile phone usage would be the most lame excuse for not coming back in the fall!!!!

phone cards, phone cards, phone cards. These save me a fortune calling to California. There are plenty of cheap and good ones. As mentioned above, EUROCITY is a good one. I used to call my family on my cell and tell them to call me back, making my call less than 1 min, but with a phone card I can actually call my friends for super cheap!

people, i need help with my phone situation with LOCAL CALLS in madrid. yes, i do use phone cards to call the united states and sometimes just call my parents for 10 seconds on my mobile and just have them call me back, but it´s my LOCAL CALLS that i´m asking about. it´s cheaper with those phone cards to call the united states than it is on my cell phone calling across town.

THE ISSUE HERE IS LOCAL CALLS IN MADRID. PLEASE HELP ME PEOPLE.

is telefonica having any deals lately?

hey, if i desired some catty talk, i´d go to some other message board about the strokes or whatever other band, or even go to groupiecentral.com or one of the other where catty boys and girls tend to congregate, but i expected better of this site.

c´mon, toss me some spanish in the subjunctive now. that will just make me smile and gurgle so hard.

if you don´t have much constructive stuffins´to say, please can it.

Looks like somebody just opened up a can of nasti-@$$. hehehe..

Can't we all just get along?!!

From what I've seen and heard, it looks like the Telefonica cards are the way to go. Everyone seems to have the same problems with the calls in Spain, but it's really up to each individual to decide what's best for them. I know we've discussed mobile/pay phones in the past on the board, so you may want to search out there too to see what other info previous posters have given.

Buena suerte!

-GG

Even though from the beginning your messages have come off as, well, NASTY, I'll help you anyway.

There are a ton of websites where you can send free messages to other cell phones in Spain. Do an internet search and find one. I always send text messages to my friends in Spain and I'm sitting here in NY. Or just don't call people... meet them in person like everyone else in Spain does.

Melinda

Basically, using a mobile phone in Spain without a contract can get pricey. It´s that simple. I learned a lot by looking at what the young people here do to save money. Text messages, text messages, text messages! They can be a pain to write but they are really cheap. There is also an option on some phones to, instead of send a regular message, "chat" even though you get charged for each message you send, it is cheaper than just one normal message (you also can´t write as much, but still a good amount). Also if you just need to tell someone that you´re downstairs waiting for them or some simple thing like that, don´t call them, give them a missed call,a "llamada perdida". Just let it ring once and hang up, you don´t get charged unless the other end picks up the phone. Due to the prices of mobile calls, people on a budget in Spain don´t usually spend that much time on their mobiles just "chatting". I guess if you were calling local non-mobile numbers in madrid, a phone card and a telephone booth would be your best bet. Just to make sure, you know that calling a mobile phone number is more expensive than calling a regular number?