It’s a great way to keep in touch with the family while I’m in China.

I go down and use the WiFi in the media center (which, since they can, they’ve charged us a large amount of $$ to access) and then fire up Skype.

If they’re online, then we can do a little bit of video phone. It’s sort of neat, but with this connection and the lag the picture isn’t that good. Once the kids start moving around the video just hangs, but I can hear everyone.

Then when the home PC isn’t on, I’ve been using the skypeout to call to our regular phone number. The super cool thing is that calling from China to the US only costs about 2 cents per minute.

That’s so awesome compared to the calling card costs that you could rack up just a few years ago if in Europe.

So today I’m going to the Silk Market and going to brave the marketplace there.