I have a phone!

I took my free day before the start of work to explore downtown and run some errands. I got my transit pass for the month, did a test trip to the WHO, and bought a couple sim cards for my phone (yes, two of them!)

Here are my new phone numbers:
Primary (Lebara): 076 753 41 79
Secondary (Swisscom): 079 885 34 73
To call from abroad, dial 0041 first and then drop the leading 0 in the phone number (you only dial the 0 if you're calling from within Switzerland).

Cell phone rates are pretty confusing here. Swisscom is the only carrier that offers somewhat reasonable data rates (1CHF/Mb, which is still fairly expensive I think) so I will only use this when I absolutely need internet (ie if/when I'm lost in the middle of nowhere and need to pull up a map!) Otherwise it's fairly expensive: 0.70/min to call mobile phones within Switzerland, or 0.80/call (up to 60 mins) to other Swisscom phones or landlines. I think it's 0.20 for SMS within Switzerland and 0.40 for international text messages. On the other hand, Lebara costs 0.45/min to other mobile phones (which is still expensive but the absolute cheapest that I found was 0.35/min with Yallo) or 0.35/min to landlines within Switzerland. It's free to call another Lebara mobile though. Texting is 0.10 to anywhere in the world. But get this...it's 0.09/min to call Canada! And on top of it all I paid 14.90 for the sim card and 22.50 worth of credit. I haven't tested it yet, but the only fine print that I could see is that they bill by the minute and there's a 0.09 "set up fee" for each call. But still, that seems pretty good!

Other interesting things to note:
- There are 5-franc coins here. And they are massive! They also have 2-franc coins (smaller) and 1-franc coins (slightly smaller still). They are all silver. So are the 1/2 franc, 20 centime and 10 centime coins. The only coin that's yellowish is the 5 centime coin. I have yet to see a 1 centime coin, though I did see a man try to pay for his groceries (12 CHF) with a 200 franc bill...until he realized that he pulled out the wrong bill.
- In Switzerland they say "septante", "octante" and "nonante" for seventy, eighty and ninety, respectively (vs "sixty-ten", "four-twenties" and "four-twenties-ten" in France and Quebec) - which makes much more sense, except that I'm not used to it!
- The toilets (yes many interesting things about the bathrooms here) have buttons to flush and to stop the flush in order to conserve water (I imagine anyway)...I have also seen little-flush and big-flush buttons. Very practical!