The Present Perfect and the Past Simple. I still wake up screaming in the night
Please, help me get out of my confusion!!
- I've bought (Here I mean that I have a new cell phone now, it's more important than the fact that I bought it some time ago. So I use the Present Perfect instead of the Past Simple) a new cell phone but I'm reluctant to bring it to work. On the other hand, I'm not going to switch the sim card from the new phone to the old one every time I leave for work, so I've bought (The same situation, there is a connection with now. 'I've bought a new sim card' is equal to 'Now I have a new phone number. I have to tell my boss about it') a new sim card. Your use of the perfect in this piece makes it more British. In American English we would use the simple past in both cases - especially the second; When you present a solution to a problem you've explained, it's more natural to use the simple past: "I got tired of not understanding anything my in-laws talked about - so I learned Spanish."
- Have you given the operator and the dispatcher your new phone number? [here the perfect indicates that this is something pending that you have to do]
Last week I was riding in a car (I mean "I was sitting in a car", so here I use "in" instead of "by") to a gravel terminal and just looking through the window at the villages passing by. Suddenly I realized that the only thing I'd always loved to distraction was hitchhiking.
Hitchhiking is the best way to travel, though it may be dangerous, espesially here, in Russia. I've been to the Ukraine, Belorussia, Bulgaria and Romania, but I haven't travelled much in Russia. My dream is to hitchhike from the Finnish border to the Ural mountains. I've lost my best partner (I don't have a partner for hitchhiking at the moment), so I hope to meet a new one (another crazy girl:). It would be great to watch the sunset, sitting in a truck cabin with my cute smiley friend, feeling the cool air, blowing on my face like a few years ago.
