SMS = Bananas

The mobile phone networks in Pakistan are an amazing blessing, one that like so many things you don't fully value, until you land in a country which follows arcane phone contract plans. Case in point: (you guessed it right) UK. UK has a majorly contract based system, get the phone and sell your soul for 24 months, and the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) plans that come with some of the network providers are even worse than the monthly plans. One text messages can cost as much as a pound of bananas (£0.12). For non-Pakistani readers, in Pakistan one text message costs £0.00002, I have no idea if you can actually get anything in UK for that price. So, for my first 4 weeks in the UK, I checked out many a service providers, trying in vain to capture Pakistani levels of dirt-cheap local calls and texts and a good price for calls back home. And then, I did what Pakistani romeos do all the time, multiple sims for multiple purposes. I got myself a Lebara sim for calling back home, which with it's £5 weekly pass, costs me 5p per minute to call to Pakistan, and for local use I went the Giffgaff way, which with it's £5 montly goody bag gives me 300 texts per month and 60 minutes, with all Giffgaff to Giffgaff calls for free. Two sims, my sturdy 6 year old Motorola C118, almost bliss. Ah, the good old days of my Pakistani Ufone and Telenor sims.