[red-beard]

You go to one of the local phone stores, and buy a sim card. It is a prepaid SIM. They give you a local phone number and you're good to go. If you run out of minutes, you go to a store and buy more time. The calls are far cheaper than the $1.99 that AT&T will charge you.

OTOH, T-Mobile only charges $0.99/minute. I have 2 phone when I'm in Europe. I keep my regular phone on, but I have a GSM phone with a Romanian SIM card with a local phone number. It costs a lot less to use. Text message people who call you your "local" Europe phone number. You will be only charged your air time rate, not an international call rate. They will pay for an International call, but they are pretty cheap these days.

I travel quite a bit and we have Vonage at home. I signed up for a vonage IP phone and programmed a LINKSYS Wifi phone. I use this and it is really cheap (like $0.05/min).

Just to Throw this out there, if you were willing to switch to T-Mobile, they offer a Blackberry Curve which is Wifi. When in a Wifi hot spot, the call route VOIP and do not count towards your plan and even in Europe, Wifi calls are not roaming. I set up 3 of my field people with this. Works great and they went from $3000/mth on AT&T to $700/mth on T-Mobile. I doubt you will use your phone as much as they do. Oh, the blackberry will rack up a lot of Data charges. The T-Mobile plan offers a flat $20/mth charge for International data.