Mobile phones

One of our first tasks after arriving was to get ourselves cell phones (I recently learned these are only referred to as your "mobile" here), since we had no way of getting in touch with each other or anyone else, and real estate agents were highly put-off when we tried to give them the house phone number instead of our mobile. After talking to one of the girls we're staying with, we headed down to a place called Vincom City Towers, which turned out to be an extremely fancy five-story mall a little ways south of Hoan Kiem Lake. The electronics store was an entire floor and was really like a giant party - loud techno music, lots of flashing lights, and me standing around looking confused. We were able to point our way to the cheapest mobiles available (about $40), and then learned that we had to go to another store to buy the SIM cards that would actually make it work. Buying the SIM card was a bit more difficult, and we ended up with an unknown amount of money on our cards for an unknown price per minute or per text. Plus the phone menus were all in Vietnamese, including the instructions on how to unlock the keypad. That all worked itself out though, and service is great here. The only issues that I'm still having with the phone are that I have no idea how voice mail works (not too big a deal, most people just text anyway), and that phone numbers here don't seem to be standardized in any way that I can figure out. Our phone numbers are both 11 digits long, which is 1-3 digits longer than other numbers I've seen. When I've tried to call other numbers (real estate agents, restaurants, whatever), they're always written in different forms, some with various prefixes that I can't figure out if I'm supposed to dial or not. Then supposedly to dial a land line from a mobile you start with 04, but that only works occasionally. Fortunately I've only once ended up with a random Vietnamese person on the other end of my calls - and that was when I tried to use a calling card that I bought at the post office.