Home in High Definition: The Closest You’ll Get without Actually Being There

It's early morning, Dad is in the bathroom shaving while two small children run around the house roughhousing. Mom is still in bed pressing the snooze button once more on the alarm clock, although the noise of the children should be enough the rouse her. The older son still fast asleep. Finally, fed up, father yells to mother, 'Ay, mama, levantate! (wake up!)' This family has just been relocated to a suburb outside of NYC from Spain for fathers job with the bank. Mornings in Spain went much smoother than here in the States. The reason being, with two small boys the only way to truly get some peace and quiet was to either wait until they had tired themselves out with play and were ready to sleep, which didn't usually happen until 3 or 4 in the afternoon, or to plop them in front of a high definition TV to watch cartoons.

Unfortunately, the boys are uninterested with the cartoons in the States due to the language difference, who wants to sit and watch their favorite show only to hear gibberish being yelled at them? Even the older child got frustrated watching sports (which are pretty self-explanatory to watch if you know the basic rules of the game) when he couldn't understand the commentators. So it was impossible to get young boys with an attention span of 20 seconds to sit watching something they could not understand.

If only Mom and Pop had done their research and realized the glories of satellite TV with the international package. Hundreds of channels that host their favorite shows all in Spanish. Cooking channels for mother, night time sitcoms for father, all the soccer channels big brother could every want, but most importantly all the cartoons to keep the two little ones sedated in the morning while father gets ready for work. Not to mention all these channels available in HD.

While occupying small children for a period of time is priceless, more important is the educational value that can come from TV watching. With the international package still comes local channels, which, naturally, are in English. Living in any new country brings with it the necessity to learn the language. The next best thing to being immersed in the language is being able to listen to it being spoken on TV. Who knows, maybe even some day the boys, and perhaps mother, will learn to love the old american pass time of football . When this happens the family will understand why football fans can hardly live without the NFL Sunday Ticket channel available with satellite TV.

The international package has been a savior for the family who has just moved from Spain. But what about those who are anticipating travel and would like to bone up on their language skills before they leave. In this day and age traveling anywhere in the world is getting easier and easier. Imagine how helpful it would be to tune into a channel in French and spend and hour a day listening. This would certainly give the HD satellite TV owner a leg up on those who only have cable.