Staying Connected

My brother Jack and I were talking the other day, and he told me about JaJah, an online service for making cheap international calls. Using JaJah, most calls between the United States and Western Europe are about 3 cents a minute (US domestic calls are 2.8 cents/min). Calls from the United States to Romania (or vice versa) are about 10 cents per minute--still pretty cheap. It's even cheaper than Skype--they charge 12.4 cents/min for international calls to Romania. The only catch is that, like Skype, you need an internet connection to use JaJah. However, unlike Skype, you get to use a regular phone, which is pretty cool. In any case, I thought it was an interesting alternative to calling cards, especially if you're calling Western Europe (actually, calls to some countries are free between registered JaJah users--like the US, England, France, Germany, Sweden, China, Australia, and several others!!) .

How it works: You create an account with Jajah.com. Once you've registered, you can purchase credits (or not, in which case they'll bill you for the minutes you use at a later date). Then you place a call by entering your phone number and the number of the person you'd like to call on their webpage. JaJah will call your phone and then begin dialing the other person. Jack and I tried it, and it seems pretty dandy. Check it out.

In other news, this blog is now listed in the Peace Corps Journals directory. You can visit there to read the weblogs of other Peace Corps volunteers around the world. In fact, I was inspired to start my own blog only after reading the blogs of PCV's currently in Romania.