Music to our ears...

We made one of our “essential” purchases from Carrefour a couple of weeks ago… a Hi-Fi system. Ended up getting an LG LX-D6960, which from searching the Web for that model number, doesn’t actually exist (who knows!)… But anyway it has all the things you need like 5 speakers and a sub-woofer, 5 DVD changer, 5.1 & DTS sound, etc… your normal high range mini home theatre hi-fi system. Cost the grand total of QAR 1049 (about $370 AUD) which is somewhere in the region of half the price you would pay in Australia. It was set to Region 2, but the added bonus is after about a minute of playing around it was easily made into a region-free DVD player (got to love redundant technology).

Also bought the Cars DVD to go with it… can’t buy a home theatre system like that without getting something new to watch! DVD’s here are one of the things that aren’t cheap at all. Region 1 DVD’s are imported from the USA on release and cost QAR140 (about $50 AUD), then other various Region Codes (mostly Region 3 or 2) are available for between QAR80-100 (around $30 AUD). I think there is a 15% import tax on both DVD and CD media because CD’s aren’t cheap either; I suppose they have to tax something! Regardless we have also bought Ice Age 2 and Brother Bear 2, just to keep the sanity so we didn’t have Small Soldiers or Cats & Dogs going in the background repeatedly! Maybe we may get around to buying something non-animated one day.

With Free To Air Satellite TV we aren't watching many DVD’s anyway… although we only have about 10 English language channels compared to the 100+ Arabic ones. I am not actually sure why, but we don’t get Qatar TV through our service. They have QTV2 which is a English language channel… would be interesting to see, but given what we have seen of the Saudi English language channel it would be more for humour value rather than actually having anything worthwhile on it. Maybe we will get cable one day, but broadband comes first by far and hopefully we will get the application for that done soon. No doubt getting that on will not be a quick process as I am sure most of the Q-Tel staff are tied up with the Games.