Category: Personal

I hate the sneakers that are available at Foot Locker and Athletes Foot here in Kuwait. In the past few years I don’t think I’ve even purchased any sneakers from here, I always ordered them from Amazon and other retailers online. Other than the fact that they don’t carry certain brands here, most of the retailers play it pretty safe and just get your average looking regular dull models. In the UK for example Foot Locker isn’t even counted as a trendy store for sneakers, Size?, Offspring and Foot Patrol for example all have better taste and carry funkier collections. Athletes Foot barely even exists outside of Kuwait!

One of my favorite TV shows is Entourage and one of the characters on the show is called Turtle who is a sneaker collector. That gave me the idea to also start my own sneaker collection. Its still really small but I only just started so it should grow a lot more in the coming year. You can check out some of my sneakers below.

I want these sneakers!! I saw them online for the first time yesterday and today I got some more info on them. Basically they will be sold exclusively at Offspring in the UK and thats it, no other place anywhere. Now the bigger problem is Offspring don’t have an online store just a stupid myspace page. The sneakers aren’t out yet but once they are I am sure I will figure out a way to get them. [Link]

I think Ramadan put me out of touch with food in Kuwait. This is like the third time since Ramadan ended that I discover a new item at a favorite restaurant. Today for lunch I passed by Sbarro, I hadn’t been there since before Ramadan and today I found out they had a new item that seemed interesting. Its a stromboli and up until today I hadn’t heard of it before. It’s something like their stuffed pizzas except the dough is rolled up.

I usually order the stuffed sausage & pepperoni pizza but I decided to try the stromboli version today. Although it looked interesting it turned out to be let down. The stromboli was very dry and in some places there wasn’t any sausage & pepperoni just dough. Compared to the stuffed pizza, the stromboli was boring and bland. It costs 950 fils which is the same price as a stuffed pizza except I would choose the stuffed over it easily. Its worth a try though. Final score 3 out of 5.

I just got back from a late night ride. I hadn’t ridden since the beginning of summer and ever since TriStar had picked up my bike and serviced it last week my bike has been begging to be taken out. Tonight was his lucky night.

I was walking Geo and noticed the weather was just amazing so when I got home I suited up and went out for a ride. Salmiya was deserted and I had all the streets to myself so I took full advantage and rode up and down at my pace enjoying my time. I was a bit rusty so I felt a lot more comfortable riding alone with no traffic just in case I made a mistake.

One thing I realized, the weather is a lot nicer in shorts and a tshirt. My full bike gear which includes thick riding pants and a thick riding jacket kinda made things hot but it still felt great riding. I think I will do this every night, its very peaceful and mind clearing.

Today was such a blast! We got to Marina Waves around 9AM in the morning and first thing we had to do was move our plane to the proper location which was the front of the line. One team ahead of us had withdrawn from the event so we became team #3 instead of #4.

Our friends started to come one by one until our station resembled a large diwaniya then judges started passing by to judge and ask questions about our plane. Every time a judge would see our plane they would get this shocked look on their faces but they all had sense of humors and cracked jokes with us. They all agreed though that our plane was the most comfortable one to sit in, kinda like a lazy boy version of a plane. Later that we found out one of the teams had a large helium canister which we quickly took advantage of. We kept filling balloons with helium and passing them around to everyone to inhale, that cracked everyone up for a while.

Finally around 2PM they started the event and we were the third plane to jump off. We were dressed as traditional Kuwaiti fisherman which didn’t make sense at all but its not like anything else did. Every team had to play a song and have a dance before they pushed the plane off the ramp and our song was Sabo7a. I think that and our dance which was also traditional Kuwaiti cracked up people the most. For me I think the dancing was the worst part, I hadn’t danced the traditional Kuwaiti dance since I was like 10 years old in school so I was just a mess but who cared it was still fun. The rest of the team, Khalid, Bader and Marzouq were naturals though as you can see in the video at the end of this post.

Once we were done with the dance we got behind the plane and Bader who was our pilot got into it and we started to push. We pushed as hard and fast as we could and just before the end we let go and stood and watched. All I saw was our plane fly out a few meters and then slam hard into the water with Bader lying on his back and this look of horror and pain on his face. It was priceless! It was then our turn to jump in, we didn’t have to but we wanted to. The only reason we participated in Flugtag was to have some fun and jumping in was the last thing we had to do.

When you look down from the edge the water looks really far but I thought about that for just a second before I just went ahead and jumped in. For some reason I decided to land on my ass so I landed pretty hard and it was kinda painful but not as bad as landing on your back which Khalid and Bader did. The water was amazing and it was just an incredible rush jumping off after such a long and amazing day. I could hear the crowds cheering and laughing and I could also hear Bader, Khalid and Marzouq all laughing. We then got on the jet skis that came to rescue us to take us back to shore, me and Khalid got on behind this one guy and just as he was taking off the whole jet ski flipped on its side and we landed on an adjacent jet ski which was pretty hilarious at the time I don’t know why.

When we got back to the shore we met up with the other teams and they congratulated us and we shared with them our experience. After that we just packed up and left since we were all wet and tired.

I have to say all the other teams we met and interacted with were also a lot of fun. Majority of the guys there were there just like us to have a lot of fun. If you actually saw the planes at the event you can tell most didn’t care about winning, everyone just wanted to enjoy the day and crash land with style. From the teams, to the Red Bull staff and even the judges, everyone was very positive, super friendly and a lot of fun. I would definitely want to participate again next year maybe even with an updated plane although I love ours the way it is. After this event I actually suggested we convert our plane to a raft and just join the yearly raft race with it.

The pictures above were taken by Nicole except for the picture of goatse (we had spray painted it at the rear of our plane), that was taken by me. The video below was shot by Nat. Special thanks to Hashem (he doesn’t have a blog so I could link to) for helping us out by being our ground crew and helium supplier.

Kuwait’s Red Bull Flugtag 2007 from Mark on Vimeo.

I’ve recently gotten addicted to the TV show Rules of Engagement. They are in their second season now but I never thought it would be interesting, for some reason I used to read the name and think it was a TV show related to lawyers and the military. Probably because I keep thinking about the movie of the same name. Luckily by accident I downloaded and episode and after watching the first one I was hooked. The show stars three great actors, Megyn Price who plays the wife on Grounded for Life, David Spade which everyone knows from Just Shoot Me and finally my favorite actor from the bunch, Patrick Warburton who played David Puddy, Elaine’s boy friend on Seinfeld, Johnny Johnson on News Radio, The Tick on The Tick and the voice of Joe Swanson on Family Guy. A truly amazing actor and super funny in his own simple way. For more information you can check out the IMDB page. [Link]

Yes I like shawermas and it seems a lot of people know that because before I left to London around a million people recommended I should try the shawermas at Ranoush. Ranoush Juice is part of the Maroush group of restaurants which are extremely popular in London and the place was located near my hotel on Edgware Road so I decided to go ahead and try it.

Good shawerma in London? I found that hard to believe and I would never have believed it had I not tried it for myself. I’ve been reviewing shawermas for a while now and its always difficult to describe the taste of a shawerma, its not easy to explain why one tastes better than the other or why it tastes worse. It’s mostly because its not one single thing alone that makes a difference, its a balance of a variety of things and this was the case with the shawermas at Ranoush. There wasn’t anything particular I could single out about their shawerma which made it special but it was. Maybe it was because I hadn’t had a shawerma for a week, I don’t know but it just felt really good having it. It felt comfortable and so perfectly balanced. The garlic wasn’t too strong but wasn’t too weak, the chicken was great and the cleanliness of the place was top notch.

Price sadly was out of this world for a shawerma, 3.25 Pounds which is around KD1.900! It completely blew away the previous record of 750 fils for the Villa Fayrouz Express shawerma but luckily for Ranoush it’s in London and KD1.900 for a shawerma is a great deal in a city where KD5 burgers are practically the norm. This is why for the final score it gets a 4.5 out of 5.

This is really messed up. One of my hard drives, a 500GB Western Digital has just died on me. The drive was full with only around 8GB of free space. It had a ton of movies, tv shows and my iTunes library. Now its fucking dead, just like that out of the blue.

Now what? Thats what I have been asking myself for the past few minutes. Do I get another hard drive and go through the painstaking task of re-downloading all the movies and shows? Where do I begin? I don’t even know what movies and shows I even had on this drive. I’ve been asking myself for a long time now why I am building a large database of shows and movies and why I don’t delete them when I am done with them. I never have a proper answer. What about the other shows and movies I have on other drives, do I just delete them as well and say fuck it to all this?

I didn’t back up my data because it wasn’t important data. The only thing I do have backed up are my MP3s but thats because they are all legally ripped from my CD’s or purchased digitally online. I backed them up because I did not want to go through the painstaking task of ripping my CDs all over again one by one. My movies and TV shows are illegally downloaded and they are just too huge to back up anyway coming in at over 1.5TB. I don’t know what I will do, its a shock. I guess I will just get another drive and just continue from where I stopped.

Well for some reason today my credit card just stopped working. It didn’t get canceled or anything of the sort, machines just don’t read the card anymore. I think the chip on my credit card got damaged somehow. Now I have to walk around with cash, sucks!

We left Paris today and got back to London but not without going on one hell of a ride.

We got to the Eurostar train station in Paris around 5PM which was around an hour before our train was set to leave. When we got to the automatic check in the machine rejected our tickets. I couldn’t understand why until an employee there arrived to help us and explained to us the problem. Our train had left over an hour earlier!

I am not one to make a lot of mistakes, I am usually the extremely reliable guy who plays it really safe and always tries to arrive earlier than the recommended time. Somehow, for some fucked up reason, I read our London arrival time as our Paris departure time. I can’t understand how that happened, looking at my non refundable non exchangeable ticket now I can’t imagine how I mixed up the departure and arrival times. Its right up on my list of dumbest things I have done in my life. We had missed our train out of Paris and that was just the beginning of our adventure.

There was another train leaving to London in around 2 hours so we headed to the really long cue queue to buy tickets and waited. While in line I tried calling NBK on 801801 to try and move money onto my credit card. I didn’t know how much I had left on the card and I didn’t know how much the tickets would cost so I figured I would play it safe and move some more money onto my visa. I spent 15 minutes trying to call Kuwait without any luck when suddenly I got through and got a hold of the NBK operator and explained to her that I wanted to move money onto my card. After 10 minutes of trying the NBK operator told me there was a problem with the NBK automated system and I should call back in 15 minutes.

We got up to the ticket counter and we asked for 2 one way tickets out of Paris. The employee told us we could get on the next train, price was 236 Euros per person which amounted to a total of 472 for the two of us. That was more than DOUBLE what I had paid for 3 weeks ago for our two way tickets! We didn’t have any other option so we asked for the tickets but when we tried paying for them both my credit card and Nat’s got rejected. Our cards were maxed out, it just wasn’t our luck.

Now you are probably thinking why didn’t I just withdraw money from an ATM machine and pay for the tickets with cash? Well the problem is when I travel I don’t keep a lot of money in my ATM card account so that just in case I get mugged at an ATM machine I can only withdraw a certain amount of money (I watch a lot of movies). It’s never been a problem before because I always use my credit card for my purchases and if I needed more money than whats available on my ATM card I just transfer more onto it.

So here was the situation, my Macbook had no battery and I didn’t have the charger so I couldn’t connect to a wifi network at the train station. There was also no Internet cafe at the station but even if there was I didn’t want to access my bank account from a public computer. I couldn’t get a hold of NBK, the answering machine never came on it just kept ringing and no one was picking up. Since I couldn’t connect to my NBK account I couldn’t use my credit card and I couldn’t withdraw any money so I was pretty much fucked.

I decided to call my sister and have her log into my NBK account and transfer money, problem was she wasn’t at home and the line kept breaking up. I then started calling my friends one by one to see if they were near an Internet connection including Bader, Marzouq and Khalid but no one was near a computer. It was just freaking frustrating. I had the money to buy the fucking tickets to get the hell out of Paris but I just couldn’t get that money onto my ATM or credit card! Time was running out by now and I needed to buy the tickets.

We decided to leave the station and head out around town looking for a place to get Internet access. After around 30 minutes of exploring and asking people we finally found an Internet cafe. I asked the guy if I could connect with my macbook but he told me it wouldn’t be possible. I looked at his computers, they had Windows XP on it… I had no clue if there were any trojans or softwares that would read and store my bank account info and passwords on the machines but I didn’t have an option, I was desperate and I just needed Internet. In literally 2 minutes I had logged into my bank account, transferred money onto my ATM and credit card and was out of the cafe. Thats all I needed, 2 fucking minutes of Internet to change the direction of my life.

We ran back to the train station with 45 minutes to spare but now we were back in the cue queue to buy tickets. 30 minutes later we purchased the tickets. The employee told us something about how our seats would be pull down seats but we didn’t care we just wanted to get on the train. We checked in, passed through passport and security check which luckily was empty and ran towards our train. If we had just been 1 minute late we would have missed the train again.

When we finally got on the train and the doors shut and we started moving, it was just the most amazing feeling of relief. Our fold down seats were these tiny seats located between the carriage cars (pictures above). They weren’t really that bad, it was kinda cozy sitting in between the carriage cars alone.

I can’t believe how an average day turned into such a mess. First thing I did when I got to my hotel room here in London was log on to the internet and change my NBK online banking password. Also when I get back to Kuwait I am going to take out another credit card and keep it aside just in case of emergencies like today. Finally Nat is going to be taking care of our traveling from now on, I am losing it!

The coins! So many fucking coins! The smallest note is like 5 pounds and everything else below is just coins. My wallet doesn’t even have a coin pocket so I am walking around with all these coins in my jeans and I am jingling the whole time like one of Santas reindeer’s.

I haven’t blogged with Mark since back in the qHate.com days. It feels like a velvet glove cast in iron.

Well the plane is almost done. We had the technical guy come over yesterday for a safety check and some other advice. It is looking good based on his view. He suggests that we cut more weight from it as possible to help the lift. Seems that every little bit helps.

All is left is our secret weapon that Mark is brining with him from his trip, and the color of it. I really hope we don’t have the same incident as last time. Huge fight broke out about which color the plane should be. We didn’t talk to each other for a week…

I passed by McDonald’s today for a quick bite to eat and noticed they had spring rolls on the menu. I hadn’t had McDonald’s since before ramadan so I don’t know how long they’ve been serving them but I decided to give it a shot.

It’s very rare for a fast food place like McDonald’s, KFC, Hardees or Burger King to introduce an appetizer and have it succeed. The only successful appetizer I can think of is the popcorn chicken at KFC. With that in mind and with the fact that chinese food is the last thing I would think of finding at McDonald’s, I proceeded to order my spring rolls with caution.

I know this might sound crazy, I know that my taste buds can be screwy sometimes and I know the Chinese are going to hate me for saying this but… the spring rolls at McDonald’s weren’t bad at all. In fact they were pretty good. I’ve tried nearly everything that McDonald’s in Kuwait ever introduced to their menu and this is why I know to always expect the unexpected with them. When they introduced their Mushroom and Swiss burger I expected it to be the best burger they’ve ever created and it turned out to be the worst burger ever.

The spring rolls comes with a sweet chili sauce which is actually a big part of the reason the spring rolls are good. The price is also good, 550fils for 6 pieces. In the end, these spring rolls are not the best spring rolls in the world. They are not even close to being the best spring rolls in Kuwait but compared to what other fast food places are offering like the crappy Hot Rods at KFC or the overpriced cheese sticks at Burger King, these spring rolls are the best appetizers being offered at the moment and best value for money. I give them a 3.5 out of 5.

Reign Over Me
The movie was slow paced but it never got dull and the soundtrack and the whole mood of the movie was very indie which made it feel less mainstream and more artsy. I don’t usually like Adam Sandlers non-comedic roles but in Reign Over Me it suited him and Don Cheadle was also a great supporting actor.

The Good German
I love war movies and I was really looking forward to this one since it was filmed to look like an old black and white film. Problem is the story turned out to be weak. I still enjoyed watching it but not enough to recommend it. The movie stars George Clooney and Tobey Maguire. If you feel like watching a black and white movie get Vertigo.

Disturbia
A guy witnesses a murder and the killer finds out the guy saw him so he tries to kill the guy. A very cliché storyline and one that I hate.

Ocean’s Thirteen
This movie was wayyy better than the previous one. While Ocean’s Twelve was boring and starred Catherine Zeta-Jones, Thirteen stars Al Pacino and the whole story is based in fast paced Vegas. Lots of funny moments and the all star team of actors are all back minus the women thankfully.

The Bourne Ultimatum
Too many chase scenes, is that a problem? I know its weird but I found it exhausting to watch. I can’t imagine anyone but Matt Damon playing the role of Jason Bourne, he’s got this cold neutral robotic look that suits the part perfectly. On the other hand I could think of at least 20 other women who could play the part of Julia Stiles. Has anyone seen her in The Prince & Me? I have no clue why they couldn’t find anyone else…

Year of the Dog
How could they go wrong with a movie staring John C. Reilly???

Fast Track (originally The Ex)
Starring Zach Braff, Jason Bateman and Donal Logue, three very funny comedians from three different very funny shows (Scrubs, Arrested Development and Grounded for Life) so I was expecting this movie to be extremely funny. It wasn’t. The funniest parts I had already seen in the trailer and what was left wasn’t good enough. REALLY disappointing.