Author: Mark

Back in September I posted that the popular UK based Italian bakery Princi was coming to Kuwait but didn’t know where they were opening. Well, they’re opening in Avenues Phase 4 since the store hoarding went up recently in the Grand Avenues. Princi was created by the restaurateur Alan Yau who is behind other popular brands like Wagamama and Hakkasan.

Baroue the kids store recently opened a snow park inside their Avenues store called Frostland. I passed by it over the weekend to check it out and was actually impressed. Mostly because I was not expecting their snow park to be so big but also because I didn’t think they would have actual snow.

Frostland is fairly huge considering its located inside a store but the Baroue store was always huge to begin with. The whole top floor of Baroue has now been converted to Frostland with different snow and ice related activities like ice slides, ice cars and the snow dome. Kids and parents are given winter gear to wear because its actually winter in Frostland and you’ll need to be properly dressed to play in the snow.

The ticket price for Frostland is 11KD for 2 hours and 6KD for guardians. If you want to check out some videos and more pictures of their snow park check out Frostland on instagram @baroue_frostland

The Improv Comedy Show by Staged in Kuwait is back again this weekend. If you’ve never been to one of their shows before then you should and there are still some tickets available if you haven’t already booked. Check out the full list of this weekends events below:

Thursday
Exhibition: Halal Nights by Mohammad Al-Hemd
13th World Bowling Tour – Kuwait International Open 2019
Happy Hour Live at Oktoberfest 2019
Improv Comedy Show

Friday
Discover America Run/Walk 2019
Happy Hour Live at Oktoberfest 2019
Hot Rod Car Show

Saturday
Exhibition: Halal Nights by Mohammad Al-Hemd
KTAA Fall Bazaar
Come Play with Us!
Sustainability Event

If you’d like to share an event on the blog [Email Me]
For a full list of upcoming events click [Here]

Sometimes events get canceled or have details changed so always double-check with the organizers.

Screenshot from Doctor Sleep

The movies below are now showing at Cinescape, Grand Cinemas and VOX:

New This Weekend:
Abigail (5.0)
Doctor Sleep (7.5)
Playing with Fire (5.1)

Other Movies Showing Now:
Abominable (7.3)
Born a King (8.8)
Countdown (5.3)
Dark Encounter (4.4)
Dora and the Lost City of Gold (5.9)
Gemini Man (5.2)
Joker (9.4)
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (7.0)
Midway (4.9)
Motherless Brooklyn (7.4)
Terminator: Dark Fate (6.5)
The Addams Family (5.8)

The movies below are also now showing at the Scientific Center IMAX theater:

Movies Showing Now:
Amazon Adventure 3D (6.6)
Backyard Wilderness 3D (8.4)
Oceans: Our Blue Planet (7.4)
Volcanoes 3D (6.6)

Numbers in brackets refer to the IMDB rating at time of publishing.

I’ve been meaning to order tires for my Lotus online for some time now since the local Michelin dealer didn’t carry tire sizes that fit my car. But I had heard two things:

1) The Michelin dealer wouldn’t order tires for you if they didn’t carry them
2) If you order tires online they’ll get stuck in customs and it would be very difficult to clear them

I didn’t follow up on the rumors right away since my tires were still in fairly good condition back then. But the new season at Kuwait Motor Town started already and now after 8 track days and 17,000KM mileage on the same set of tires, I knew it would be time to change them soon so I needed to find a solution.

This post is to clear the two rumors above which turned out to be false.

The Michelin Dealer
First thing I did was pass by the Michelin dealer on Canada Dry street to see if they would be willing to order the following tires for me:

Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 – 215/45 R17 x2
Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 – 285/30 R18 x2

They told me they could and I had two options, either ship them by sea freight which could take anywhere between 4 to 8 weeks, or by air which would take up to 2 weeks. They took my email and sent me a proposal that came to the following:

Total for 4 tires if shipped by air: KD540
Total for 4 tires if shipped by sea: KD374

Ordering Tires Online
I decided to check and see how much my tires would cost if I ordered them online myself and shipped them straight to Kuwait. I found my tires on Camskill.co.uk for a great price and they would be willing to ship them directly to Kuwait using FedEx. The total with shipping came out to just KD336 so I placed an order and within 5 days I had the tires. They cleared customs with no issue except for the fact I had to pay FedEx KD28 for the customs fees and clearance cost. The total in the end came out to KD364. So KD10 cheaper than the dealers sea freight cost but arrived in just a few days instead of a few weeks.

So if you need specific tires that aren’t available locally I would head to the local dealer first and see if they would order them for you or alternatively, you could order them online if you were in a hurry like me or just didn’t want to bother with Shuwaikh.

Last night I got on Carriage and got a pop-up message saying I needed to choose a new Carriage Black plan. There was previously just one option, KD3.5 a month for unlimited deliveries which honestly a too good to be true price and I’ve saved a ton of money because of it. But recently Deliveroo stopped their free delivery promo so Carriage has now updated their Carriage Black pricing structure as well.

The new pricing isn’t bad at all since I order from Carriage daily. I’ll probably go with the KD7.5 a month plan since I rarely order from the grocery section and if I do it’s nothing good, usually chocolates which I should stop ordering anyway. But I will miss the old days when Deliveroo was free and unlimited deliveries on Carriage was just KD3.5 a month.

Why do people not like parking inside multistory parking lots? We have probably the cheapest parking rates in the world and yet loads of people prefer parking illegally right outside the parking lot instead of legally and safely inside.

I was with a friend last time who was looking for parking in his brand new expensive car in a tight back road barely hitting other cars who were coming down the road the wrong way and I was like dude, look on your left, there is an empty multistory lot just go inside and park there wtf?

I’m not complaining, its actually better for me since this way I’ll always find parking inside those lots but I’m just really curious to why people don’t like multistory lots and I know it can’t be just a financial reason.

While we’re on the subject of Ahmadi today, here are some photos of KOC buildings from the early 60s. These were old postcards that were scanned and the descriptions were written on the back.

One of the married payroll employees houses at Ahmadi

Kuwait Oil Company’s guest house, Ahmadi

The training centre at Ahmadi

Housing for bachelor payroll employees at Ahmadi

For more old postcards (all for sale) click here.

I came across these photos years ago but when I searched the blog I realized I had only shared a couple of them. Below are some photos of a home taken by a family who used to live in Ahmadi back in the early 60s.

Ok this is going to be a long shot but does anyone have an Ahmadi Desert Motoring Club car badge for sale? Back in the old days (like 50s/60s etc.) people use to put badges on their car grills similar to the photo below and so I’m looking for the ADMC car badge to put on the front grill of my Alfa.

There are different variations of this badge either with the word Kuwait or Persian Gulf written on it, I’m not picky and fine with either one. I can’t find the exact date these badges were used by the club in Kuwait but I’m assuming it was in the 50s to late 60s, maybe early 70s.

If you have one or know anyone who would want to sell theirs, let me know!

Last year I posted about how much I hated the housekeeper’s category on the Q8 4Sale website since people were listing their housekeepers for sale. After my post, the 4Sale website started removing those posts and set new rules for the category but I still wished they had closed it down instead. Well it took a thorough BBC investigation and reporting for that to happen.

Over the weekend, BBC published its investigative video below exposing the trade by interviewing a number of people who were selling their housekeepers including a police officer and a woman who was selling her 16-year-old housekeeper!

Posing as a couple newly arrived in Kuwait, the BBC Arabic undercover team spoke to 57 app users and visited more than a dozen people who were trying to sell them their domestic worker via a popular commodity app called 4Sale.

The sellers almost all advocated confiscating the women’s passports, confining them to the house, denying them any time off and giving them little or no access to a phone.

The 4Sale app allowed you to filter by race, with different price brackets clearly on offer, according to category. Source

After the video and article went viral, Kuwait announced that it was cracking down on slave traders and I checked the 4sale website and it looks like they finally completely removed the housekeeper’s category. Hopefully, this will cause the government to consider reforming the kafala (sponsorship) system which in it’s current state is flawed and being abused. Check out the BBC articles on this subject below:

Slave markets found on Instagram and other apps (Oct 31)
Kuwait moves on Instagram slave traders after BBC investigation (Nov 1)

Some fun things happening this weekend including a different musical event taking place every night this weekend. Check out the full list of events below:

Thursday
Exhibition: Halal Nights by Mohammad Al-Hemd
13th World Bowling Tour – Kuwait International Open 2019
Luna & Boo! Halloween Party
Manifesting Rhythm with Sid & Turk

Friday
Open Track at Kuwait Motor Town
13th World Bowling Tour – Kuwait International Open 2019
Kuwait Rising Music Festival
Saracen Race 2019

Saturday
Exhibition: Halal Nights by Mohammad Al-Hemd
13th World Bowling Tour – Kuwait International Open 2019
Japanese Society’s Beach Cleaning-up Campaign “Operation Turtles”
Come Play with Us!
Marketspace
The Peace Festival: Salute Yal Bannot

If you’d like to share an event on the blog [Email Me]
For a full list of upcoming events click [Here]

Sometimes events get canceled or have details changed so always double-check with the organizers.

Screenshot from Terminator: Dark Fate

The movies below are now showing at Cinescape, Grand Cinemas and VOX:

New This Weekend:
Midway (4.9)
Motherless Brooklyn (7.4)
Terminator: Dark Fate (6.5)
The Addams Family (5.8)

Other Movies Showing Now:
Abominable (7.3)
Angel Has Fallen (7.0)
Born a King (8.8)
Countdown (5.3)
Dark Encounter (4.4)
Dora and the Lost City of Gold (5.9)
Gemini Man (5.2)
Joker (9.4)
Killerman (5.2)
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (7.0)
Mary (4.4)
Zombieland: Double Tap (7.3)

The movies below are also now showing at the Scientific Center IMAX theater:

Movies Showing Now:
Amazon Adventure 3D (6.6)
Backyard Wilderness 3D (8.4)
Journey to Space 3D (6.4)
Oceans: Our Blue Planet (7.4)
Volcanoes 3D (6.6)

Numbers in brackets refer to the IMDB rating at time of publishing.

If you’re itching to buy an interesting book about Kuwait, this is one that came out in 2008 but copies of are still available online. The book deals with the construction of the Kuwait National Assembly building that was designed by Jørn Utzon who was also behind the design of the Sydney Opera House.

Completed in 1982, the Kuwait National Assembly remains one of the outstanding modern buildings completed in the Middle East by a European architect. A tour de force of precast concrete construction, Jørn Utzon’s design also represents the culmination of themes that had preoccupied him throughout his work, notably ways of combining ideas derived from traditional cultures with the ‘additive’ principles of cellular growth found in nature. This beautifully produced book, the latest addition to Edition Bløndal’s acclaimed ‘Utzon Logbook’ series, was developed in close collaboration with Utzon and presents an exceptionally comprehensive account of the Kuwait project through photographs, original drawings and the recollections of key contributors – Utzon’s staff, consulting engineers and contractor, and an extended interview with Utzon himself.

If you check out the publisher’s website they have two videos taken during construction which I had never seen before. You can check those out here.

If you want to buy the book I got my copy from Amazon for $69.

A couple of weeks back I finally got my license plates for my Alfa and since then been trying to drive it as much as possible. Transcrate my shipping company handled all the paperwork and process for me so if you want to know what the process was to get plates I have no idea. The first drive I think was the scariest since I didn’t know if everything was working properly, or if something was broken or would break. Thankfully, everything is running great so far.

I’ve actually been driving the car pretty hard, with old cars things will breakdown its something you just have to accept. Since I want this car to be my winter daily, then I need whatever it is that is about to break to actually break so I can swap the part out for a newer one. One thing that is super weird is the widespread availability of all the parts. Websites like Classic Alfa stock all the parts I need for my car and ship directly to Kuwait with DHL. I love that because I can drive the car and not have to worry about something going wrong because if something does go wrong I can just easily have the part delivered in a few days.

So far the things that have gone wrong with the car have been minor. The fan belt needed replacing and I found a new compatible belt locally, my dashboard lights toggle switch broke so I ordered a new one, and finally, my left turn signal stopped working but I haven’t had time to figure out why. But that’s it so far.

The car is a lot more fun to drive than I was expecting. It’s pretty zippy, sounds great and I love the very minimal interior. I don’t even have a radio in this car and I like that although it means I no longer can listen to podcasts on my way to work in the morning.

On the other hand, my blue Datsun 240z is now getting a full restoration job. Currently, it’s being stripped down to its bare shell so that all the rust can be removed and holes patched before getting a proper paint job. There is a garage called Blue Collar that just opened a new location to handle classic cars and they’re the ones who are doing all the bodywork. Another garage is rebuilding a new engine for me in the meantime while I’ve also been ordering parts online for the past few weeks. The bodywork alone needs around 3 months so I’m hoping to have the car ready before summer since the Datsun will be my summer daily.

If you have a classic car let me know in the comments below and please share a picture!