The Mobiles Arrive

How Much Is Your Dollar Worth?

$1 = 5.9632 SEK

Hooray! We finally have cell phones, oops... mobile phones, again! So finally the phone saga is behind us. We hope. You've read it on this site before that we decided to order a couple phones from the States on eBay. We found a couple of LG Shines, pictured here, from a company listed as being in Hollywood. Doesn't get more American than Hollywood eh?. The prices were ok, buying a phone straight up is not exactly cheap but still less than they are here, and the shipping was good for two phones shipped to Europe. They came in a couple days earlier than we expected which was even better.

We open the box and look inside and the phones look pretty sweet. Very "shiny." Ha Ha. The company was kind enough to ship European chargers to us so we can plug them in here, plus adapters for North America so that we can still use them when we get back to the States. Looking at the manual you could see Cyrillic letters and so we thought, oh, maybe they sent us European phones and so the Russian or Cyrillic based language is just one of many in the manual. We open the phones to turn them on and notice that it has some Cyrillic letters on the keys too. (Plus English). The manuals turn out to be almost completely devoid of English except for the last two pages - which only told us how to use the camera and mp3 player on the phone. I casually take a look at the boxes, which are very cool by the way, and notice that the phones are Ukrainian. Super. So because we could not get phones here in Sweden, we order phones from the States, which really came from the Ukraine. (The Ukraine or is it just Ukraine? I guess it's Ukraine but doesn't The Ukraine sound better?) It's not like we found some really cool phones in Ukraine that we couldn't live without and decided we must have them. We bought these from the States, payed to have them shipped, payed taxes to customs for bringing them into the country, only to learn that maybe we could have had them shipped from a much closer location. D'oh! Obviously cautious readers would be leery of how these Ukrainian phones came to us from Hollywood, and probably with good reason, but fortunately they seem to work fine and so I'm going to say "Hey, it just makes for another interesting chapter in the book."

Here are a couple of left over pictures from our 4th of July celebration. There's a picture of the flag cake we made. It was quite a hit and since then Ragen and I have been asked to provide cake for our large group gatherings. Last night in fact we brought another cake to a welcome party for a couple more researchers over from Bristol to work on the dog program.

Here we have a picture of some of the Swedish team playing Kubb. It's a Swedish lawnbowling/lawndart kind of game involving throwing sticks at blocks and a king. Typically alcohol is involved. We ended up playing Swedes vs. the rest of the world. Look for it soon at a family bbq in your neighborhood.

And here is the British flag that flew over our 4th of July celebration, because Ragen's boss is English and she was hosting. Our flag cake was 10 times cooler and more memorable. People still talk about it. USA! USA!