warm weekend getaway in a non-🇪🇺 country

My post-pandemic leisure traveling was mostly within the 🇪🇺 boarders. Such european trips come with one less worry, and that's mobile data roaming charges📱💶. Few hours before the trip I realized that my beloved "roam like at home" that I enjoy at 🇪🇺 destinations will not be a thing during our weekend adventure at Tel-Aviv, Israel 😟. Access to mobile internet during a spontaneous, not very well planned trip is essential. Navigation, discovering places of interest & restaurant reviews are just few of the things that internet connected phones provide;

staying offline was not an option 🙅

My first instinct was to just go with the obvious solution, "just get a local sim". Local sims are great and all, but few things kept my mind skeptical about them:

• how easy is to get my hands on one in 🇮🇱?
• iPhone has only 1 physical sim slot, my phone number from back home will be unreachable 📴
• is it worth the cost? 💸

time to visit my good friend Snoo for some answers...

a quick look at some other redditors post quickly pointer out what I also thought as the obvious solution. They suggested to get a prepaid israeli sim, preferably a "low cost" operator like 019 Mobile. The catch is that if you buy it from the airport it will cost you around 40-50 USD for something like 3-4 GBs for 8 days, yikes😱. Easy access to the sim without leaving the airport data-less was tempting but price quite steep for just some google-mapping and reading some reviews online during a 2 day weekend getaway, not to forget that the local sim solution meant sim swapping between my personal sim from back home. Actually this last point was the key to what I ended up going with.

hello, esim 🙌

turns out there is this nice little apps that you can install on your esim capable smartphone and do something amazing. They offer this global mobile internet packages that can get you something like 2-3 GBs of data that work in 70-80 countries around the 🌎, including 🇮🇱 😊. This is not a sponsored post so make sure to do your research before making a choice if you find yourself in a similar situation, but what worked for me was an app called DENT. 7-8 USD got me around 2GBs of data, more than enough for my 2 day trip. So this solution satisfied all three concerns I had 🥰. With the mobile data worries out of my way, I was able to enjoy my trip and navigate the vibrant city of Tel-Aviv using apps like Gett, Moovit & Lime

I'll cover things and places I liked during this short trip in an upcoming post, so stay tuned 📺 ... 😊