Getting my cell phone to work

Yes, our cell phones from Cingular work over here but obviously cost a fortune to use. So I localized my phone so I could use one of the local services for far less money. The process begins by going to a local cell provider store. I chose T-Mobil as they are the provider for the office phones and on platform calls should be cheap or free. I went with a few people from work so that I could have some translators with me. We walked into the shop and you push a button on a little machine that looks like a credit card machine printer. There are 2 buttons to choose from... one for prepaid and one for contract. I went with prepaid as we don't have an address yet. So the little printer spits out a ticket with a number on it. My number was 104. There are like 10 employees in the store at a center island, each with their own work area. Above each of their heads is a number from 1 to 10. Then, hanging from the ceiling above the ticket machine are a bunch of little LED boards with the numbers of the workstations. 104 popped up on the board next to number 8 and we went to that station. One of my co-workers took over at this point and explained I wanted a SIM card and the prepaid service. The attendant then took out a large sized box from under the counter filled numerous with little boxes...these little boxes were all SIM cards. I then got to sort through the boxes and pick my phone number. They put in the SIM card and it asked for an additional password; apparently places in the US lock their phones from working on other networks. The SIM card and prepaid credit cost me 400 Kč (slightly less than $20 US) for 400 Kč of credit - thus the SIM card is technically free. Quick conversion lesson - while it changes daily, it is approximately 22.80Kč = $1 US Dollar) From there, we went to a cell phone shop around the corner. The have techs there who will unlock phones & for another 400 Kc they had it unlocked it in about 20 minutes, loaded my new SIM, and it worked great...I didn't even lose my address book. Differences with this SIM is it makes you put in the pin for the card anytime the phone has lost power. I think there is a way to shut it off but I may keep it like this for the added security. I then went and looked for a power adapter to use with the charger for the phone. That did not go as smoothly. The one I found did not seem to work right and fried the charger. So, back to the cell phone shop I go and they had a 220v charger for my phone for like 180 Kč (remembering the above lesson, this works out to be about $8.66 US). This was actually less then what I paid for the faulty converter :( The funniest thing about spending all this time on my phone is that my call button does not work, nor does my volume or voice recognition dialing buttons...so this SIM will eventually make its way into Pam's cell phone and we will have to get hers unlocked & I have a phone on order through the office :)