[Asick]

Then, as she was arguing with them in the Megafon store about making it work, after not being able to place a call not five minutes before, it started working. Worked fine after that!

Well, I have an idea that the SIM was not registered in the network and in the MegaFon users DB before it got transported in the US. So, it remained inactive for all that time. Russian SIMs are usually inactive since their birth, and in many cases they should be specially activated by sending the personal info from a dealer to the operator support. It usually takes a few hours to go online. So, she had probably gotten an inactivated SIM. They could refuse to activate the SIM, so I'm sure it was them (MegaFon support) who did activate it after they talked and they probably did it on their good will only (since she was not able to prove the SIM was hers).

I know that, but I still think it's funny, because it said "New Orleans Passport Agency" and I'm from North Carolina. That's a quarter of the way across the country. It's also certainly not issued by a police department, a city-funded - not federally-funded or even federally-regulated - agency in the US.

For a Russian it seems to be completely strange to have passports issued by non state organizations, since passports are supposed to provide some personal identification, which is completely linked to the rights and responsibilities put and allowed by the state. Anyway, here a passport might be issued in another region than your home one too, because you can move and you do not have to change your passport with every move you make. You just change passports when they expire.

I was kind of wondering why it was the "one card of payment." That explains that.

Absolutely. Before, cards were different for every branch, and were carrying the same brands (MegaFon, GSM Lite etc.), so it made some mess for people travelling from one region to another.

I'd set it up, but I had (and still have) no idea how to set up call redirection. I haven't had a GSM phone in four years.

You can do it from the phone menu (it should be something like Settings->Call options->Divert calls->Voice calls->Not reachable->Activate on your T39) or using the network control codes. It's quite easy to do.

1st of July you mean, right?

Oh, yes. I mistyped. And, yes, CPP works only when you are located in the SIM's home region. Once you leave it, the 'innernetwork' roaming starts, thus incoming calls are no longer free. AFAIR they are 9 rubles/min with MegaFon. A region... do you know what's that? It's область, i.e. there are 4 regions between Moscow and St.Petersburg: Moscow and St.Petersburg with their rural areas themselves, Novgorod region and Tver region. You need to buy separate SIMs for every region you visit to get free incoming calls along the whole route. It's not any convenient. Luckily, you still can recharge in another region, you can use some network specific services etc., it's a sort of strange roaming, half-roaming. :wacko: