When we arrived in France from Canada, we rented a car at CDG and drove to Riems (think.. fizzy drinks) for a three-night stay. Once there, our first task was to find a mobile phone for use during the trip.

Ended up getting one from Orange for EU25, plus EU15 for more than enough air time. Tiny little basic Samsung handset, and it worked perfectly for voice and texts over the following month. Very handy.

I'm an English speaker, and can also usually muddle my way around a conversation in French. I can also now understand some Italian (baby talk), but on the whole I'm pretty useless for speaking it. ("Si, Si!").

Jane is totally fluent in English and French, and has been improving her Italian since our previous trip to Italy. But man.. whenever that phone buzzed, it always took a few moments for her to shift language gears to match whoever was calling.

Mostly just the places we had reservations for later on: B&Bs and Agriturismos. They all like to touch base in advance to verify that we were still going there. And some of them even picked us up at the station/airport. The phone was very useful for all of that.

A surprising number of places in Italy were run by people who also spoke French. Which made for much easier communications, though the similarities with Italian really tripped up Jane from time to time.