No mobile, no friends

I brought two (Swiss) mobile phones with me when I came to Japan. What I didn't realize is that Japan uses a different technology and our phones do generally not work here. I was annoyed, but thought "what the hell, I have lived without a mobile phone before". Yes, I have BUT a) hardly anyone else had one back then b) I was not in a foreign country frequently meeting people I had just met and c) most importantly I was not in Japan where a mobile phone is the key to social life (it's pretty much become that in Switzerland too by the way).
I soon noticed that Japanese mobile phones are way more sophisticated than ours and that the Japanese use them for many things we generally don't use them for. GPS, dictionary, weather forecast, checking e-mails, blind dating, kanji translator, health and fitness supervisor, cash machine locator, etc., etc. There are few things that you don't seem to be able to do with the more sophisticated versions of the product.
The "keitai" as is its name in Japanese is essential for social life and survival here. And I didn't realize what the consequences would be of not having one. Japanese love to exchange phone numbers. So whereever you go you'd be asked for your phone number (not just by guys ;-). I thought giving an e-mail address would be an adequate substitute. But turned out it was not. These days, a lot of Japanese do not use their web e-mail anymore, but use e-mail over the phone. To filter out spam, all e-mails coming from the web are blocked, only those sent by phone are received. So I ended up being frustrated over failure messages, before I finally found out what had caused these.
Well, a Japanese mobile phone had been on my "must have" list since the beginning of my stay here anyway. Funny, because I never cared about them at home, but here they are just too seductively fancy, hightech, stylish - you name it... They seem to be of quite a different, more advanced breed and I am amazed that they have not spread over to Europe yet. So after having made the mistake of renting a phone for 2 weeks, which cost me a horrendous 70$ while a cheap new phone is 60$, I purchased my own keitai. The guys at the Softbank (Japanese mobile provider) shop got slightly nervous at the prospect of having to explain their deals in English, but somehow we managed to conclude the business (despite my lack of a Japanese address which was a problem too).
It's great to be able to reach people again. I've now had the phone for 2 months and I notice that it's also pretty good to learn Japanese. Writing and receiving text messages really improves my kanji reading and writing skills. I had to first figure out how to write on the mobile phone, but it is actually pretty simple once you've gotten into it. So I can claim that my keitai is useful in more than one way...