How to call Ireland from Canada/US

Making phone calls here, and to here, is confusing the hell out of me, because there are different rules if you are calling a mobile phone than if you are calling a landline. You actually DIAL differently depending on what you are calling - landlines have area codes, for example (Dublin's area code is 1), but mobile phones do not. And unlike the changes that have been in place at home - where you dial the area code regardless of where you are calling from - it's old-school here, so if you're in Dublin, you don't need to dial the Dublin code. Or at least I think. I will figure this out and write a more comprehensive guide later, but for now, I am interested in one thing: how my family and friends back home can call ME here.

Calling from Canada/US:

- The first thing to know is that when making an international call, you need to 'get out' of the country. To do this, you dial 011. That's why international numbers are always listed with a ++ in front of them. The ++ stands for whatever code you need to dial from your own country in order to signal that you are calling internationally.

- Then you need to know the country code that signifies Ireland. This is 353. I know this is confusing, because the country code for Canada and the US is simply 1, which, to me, has always just meant 'long distance'.

- Then it gets a bit more complicated. Generally, the phone number consists of an area code (one or two digits), and then 7 more digits. I'm just talking landlines for the moment - mobiles are for another day.

- Dublin's area code is 1, and it seems like most phone numbers - the 7 digits - start with an 8.

- So, to call a Dublin landline from Canada, you dial:
011 353 1 8XX XXXX

- Now, if the number above were a Dublin mobile, and you were still calling from Canada, you would omit the single '1', which is the Dublin area code. I don't know why.

I learned some of this through trial and error, some of it by looking doe-eyed at acquaintances here and pleading for help, but most of it from this site: How to Call Abroad. It's a great site to bookmark forever.

But really, all of this is hardly relevant if you just set up Skype on your computer. It is free to set up, and free to make calls to any other computer with Skype on it. FREE.

One last thing: Ireland is currently 5 hours ahead of Toronto. So if you want to catch someone in Ireland before, say, midnight, then call them before 7pm your time. If you feed the phone after 7pm, Gizmo turns into a Gremlin. The cool thing is that if you are an insomniac, and you're awake at 4am, you could call your Dubliner friend right away, and it would be a very decent morning hour in Ireland. I've just put a clock at the top of the right sidebar - it lists the current time in Dublin.