Calls to the U.S. from Germany

In Würzburg and Nürnberg in Germany, we walked into the tourist information offices and asked about stateside calls. They each referred us to local businesses that allowed us to make phone calls to the states through the internet. It was very cheap. My sister-in-law - who made the calls - said the sound quality was good.

I very much enjoyed a 2 week vacation from my cell phone last year. If our family really needed to get in touch with us, they had our hotels' phone numbers. You can get WiFi in virtually every hotel you stay in, or they'll have a desktop available in the lobby for customers' use. I communicated with home by laptop. Next time, I'll get more used to a notebook or something a little smaller/lighter before I go.
See Rick Steve's section on communicating.

If you go to an internet cafe, many of them have phone booths where you can make your call for a few cents per minute, or you can buy phone cards to make international calls, also bringing the price down to a couple of cents per minute. Tough is to find a pay phone sometimes, as using the hotel phones may also incur a charge. You can always ask your hotel how that works to use their phone and have them show you which number to use on the back of the card. If you use the domestic/in country long distance number, your 10 euro card will be used up in a flash if you call the US. This happens to people all the time and then they think the card is a rip-off.

My experience was the opposite of Jo's. The phone card I bought for €5 gave something like 200 minutes to the US from a landline, but only 20 minutes from a payphone. Of course, the one time I really needed to make a call, my hotel didn't have a phone in the room, so I had to use the payphone. Now, €0.25 per minute isn't too bad, but €0.025 is a lot better. What you do depends on how much you need to be in contact. For occasional calls, using an Internet point or phone cards should be fine. If you will be making more frequent calls, or need to make calls from anywhere, you can get your T-Mobile phone unlocked (since it worked in the past, you know it has the correct frequencies). You can then buy a German SIM; I used T-Mobile DE, which only cost €10 for €10 of credit (Vodafone wanted €45 for €45 of credit). I only used it for domestic calls, so I don't know their rates to the US, but you can get more information about German cell phone plans here (look at "Prepaid Offer" for each company to see details): http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en/germany.html. If you have more questions about plans, the Prepaid GSM forums are a great resource, but they can get very technical, so don't be afraid to ask for clarification: http://www.prepaidgsm.net/forum/germany/

Hi, If you don't use a cell phone, go to an internet cafe. I've found that in the big cities they are located in the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) area. At least, that's the case in Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Düsseldorf. That's the cheapest. I buy also the 10 Euro phone card to use at public phones where the card is accepted. Where to get them: usually I buy them at the train station, sometimes at the bookstore, try Virgin Music if it's located in the station, which carries Deutsche Telecom phone cards.

I now use my Ipod touch with Skype for calls home (using WiFi). I set it up to call landlines at a couple of cents a minute. It's very easy and cheap to call home. I did add earbuds with a microphone because the built in microphone/speakers aren't ideal when there is background noise. Before I started that I used one of two options for cheap calls home. Option one is buying a "pin" card at a newstand/tobacco shop/7-eleven and calling from a pay phone. This works well but, like an ATM, you need to match a symbol on your card to a symbol on the phone so the card works with that phone. When you buy the card have them point you to a phone you can use to get started. Like cell phones, the cheapest per minute are cards that only work in one country but you can buy cards that work from multiple countries. Option two is calling from an internet cafe. Over the years, I've made some calls at very reasonable prices. Internet cafes are less common as WiFi and personal devices are now commonplace. I'm not sure I'd plan on regularly finding internet cafes in Europe today. I don't like using a cell phone for international calling for anything other than a dire emergency. The prices are pretty outrageous - I try to save money where I can, so I can spend it where I want.