The Sun Always Shines On TV

Before we departed the US for Post, we (ok me) were trying to decide what to do about a tv. The US runs on 110v electrical current. Pretty much every where else runs on 220v. In the US, other than a few specialty stores and online retailers, you cannot find a 220v tv. We did consider just purchasing a 110v tv at Costco or Best Buy and shipping it over and just running it on a transformer, but I received some good advice from someone in the Foreign Service who said to wait until I got to post. So that is what we did.

Once we arrived at Post we were supplied a small tv as part of our Welcome Kit. By small I mean maybe 32" (we had a 50" tv before in our house so anything less than that was small to us). The tv worked and served us well, but we also knew that once our House Hold Effects arrived, the Housing office could take back the tv. Before we arrived in Tbilisi, we had been in contact with some of our new neighbors to find out about stores, etc. in town. We found out there were two "Wal-Mart/Target" style stores here, Goodwill (no not the Goodwill back in the US but a German-based chain) and Carrefour (French-based chain). Both of which sold electronics.

When we arrived I started to check out both stores. Goodwill had a small selection whereas Carrefour had a quite large electronic section.

The above picture is illegal. For some reason stores here have some sort of "no pictures allowed" rule. But you can see from the above Carrefour has a decent selection of TVs (this is just a small fraction of what they carry). Carrefour carried everything from Samsung, to Sony and with all sizes. After doing some comparison, I found a 47" Samsung LED tv that was dual voltage and multi-region for like 800 or so GEL, or roughly $650. Ok, this will work. So when I went to pay for it, I popped down my Diplomatic ID (which entitles us to have the Value Added Tax, or VAT removed from our purchases). All of a sudden, the price dropped to around 740 GEL! Bingo!

We have been extremely happy with the tv. We have our Blue-Ray player, Wii-U and Apple TV connected to it via HDMI. The tv has only 3 HDMI connections, and to get a tv with more would have been quite a bit more money. Sorry, I'm cheap. Only once that I recently recall have I had to remove something in order to connect another device.

A few more things to add. We don't have cable/satellite service. It's not that we can't get it, but all of the packages we can get, the majority of the stations are in Russian/Georgian. While it may be good to help us pick up bits and pieces of the language, we just don't think it's worth it. We use an Apple TV (which you can pick up refurbished from Apple for $75). With pretty good Internet here + VPN we are able to stream quite a bit from the US. Also, the Wii-U has the Amazon Prime app, so we have another means to get movies. Allot of people here use AFN but at this point (because of our good Internet connection) we opted not to spend the money on an AFN dish/decoder. We may get one for our next post if our Internet connection isn't all that great. Also, the tv is connected to a UPS. While electricity is more or less stable here, we do have the occasional brown-out/power loss. Having the UPS just adds another layer of protection to the tv.

Since we are an Apple household (yes I know I have Microsoft certifications but Apple does make things easier) we can connect to say CBS.com and then use AirPlay to stream the content from our iMac to the AppleTV. So Deb and I can still watch our shows, just a day later.

One final thought, if you do purchase a tv, save the box/packing material. Ours is saved in the garage, so we when move next December we can just put the tv right back in to its original packaging and send it on it's way to our next post.