I use skype all the time to speak to the family at home when I am travelling. The free way of doing this is to load skype onto your laptop and do the same with a home PC. It doesn't matter if you and your home PC have different versions of the software, they still "talk" to each other. Follow all the directions on installation and you're good to go. This also gives you the facility to open up a video call with them providing you have a webcam. These are a bit jumpy and grainy but, as they are free, quite nice to use. You can see them, they can see you

If you don't have a home PC (or want to speak to family when they are not at home) you can charge up your skype account via a credit card and then make normal calls from your skype software on your laptop to a landline or mobile number. I don't know the cost in UK (for example) to US but I can call a UK mobile from China for about $0.02/minute

Call quality is gererally fine with no appreciable delay. I only have problems in some really crazy places, you should be fine in European cities. If there seems to be a problem then usually I disconnect and redail, this often solves the problem.

nickyboy