Category: Personal

A while back Villa Fayrouz Express opened up on Baghdad Street in Salmiya. It’s a take-out version of their popular Lebanese restaurant of the same name minus the express. Since the place is in my neighborhood I had to try their chicken shawermas and I have to say I was surprised.

I was surprised because each chicken shawerma cost 750 fils! That officially makes it the most expensive shawerma I have ever reviewed and it also makes it the most expensive shawerma I know of in Kuwait. 750 fils, thats three times the price of a shawerma at Badar Al Badoor and more than double that of Dodo. So is it worth it?

It takes only one bite to realize why the shawerma is priced so expensive. Its the quality of chicken they use, it tastes fresh and healthy. From the chicken to the garlic its all just top notch quality. They also aren’t stingy, I can barely finish two sandwiches at Villa Fayrouz Express while at Dodo for example I could easily have three in addition to a side order of fries. The sandwich isn’t huge mind you, its fat and short but not huge.

So back to the main question, is it worth 750fils? No, I personally don’t think so. I mean I really don’t care where I eat shawerma (except for this one place next to my office) as long as it tastes good. I have now had shawermas ranging from 200 to 750 fils and I can confidently say that I would rather have Badar Al Badoor’s 250 fils shawerma over Villa Fayrouz Express. Not because for the price of one shawerma at Villa Fayrouz Express I can have two shawermas and a kofta sandwich at Badar Al Badoor, but I also felt Badar Al Badoor’s shawerma was more fun. Shawerma isn’t meant to be healthy or made from great quality, its supposed to just taste good and thats it. Still though for people who care about hygene and are looking for a good shawerma Villa Fayrouz Express is highly recommended. My final score is a 4 out of 5.

Disappointed, thats one way to summarize the movie for me. Maybe I was hoping the movie would stay true to the original cartoon or maybe I was hoping more then just a handful of transformers in the movie but whatever the reason is I didn’t like the movie.

Firstly I think there really wasn’t a proper story. To me it looked like the movie was written around the fight scenes. Its as if they went ok, we need to have one big fight here, two big fights there, a small one here and a nice big one in the end, now go write a movie. I know this movie is just an action packed movie with special effects made for the general audience but after Lord of the Rings this is no longer an excuse. You can have amazing special effects, lots of fight scenes, great characters AND a deep intriguing story and still make it mainstream and a box office success. Seriously with a franchise like Transformers how hard could it have been to write a proper script?

My second problem is the actual Transformers, they neither resemble nor act like their cartoon counterpart. I hate the super detailed industrial look of the movie robots, I prefer the sleeker and simpler cartoon version. Another thing, Megatron is supposed to be a gun not a plane, Ratchet is supposed to be white (thats why my MacBook is called Ratchet), Bumblebee is supposed to be a VW Beetle and Starscream is supposed to be annoying as hell! I used to love watching Megatron and Starscream argue with each other in the original cartoon but it doesn’t happen in this movie. I can’t help but feel this movie should have been an epic not a quickly scrambled together movie. Look at Star Wars and Star Trek! Because the story was short but the fight scenes extremely long, we never got a chance to get close to any of the Transformers, maybe Bumblebee since he had the largest role but he also hardly spoke. All of them actually barely had any speaking lines! My favorite part in the movie without ruining it for people who haven’t watched it is when the Transformers went to the guys house to get “the thing”. There were a bit of funny moments there and we got a feel of the different personalities of the robots but that was it, no other scene even got close to that.

Also, whats up with the heavy advertising in the movie? The guy is video conferencing with his wife and there is a huge ass “Cisco Networking” logo on the screen, a Transformer crash lands from space and visits the Pontiac dealership, another a Hummer dealer. Oh and they are ALL American cars! They took Bumblebee, a German VW Beetle and turned him into an American Cheverolet Camaro. Later in the movie you also have the Sprite machine and Xbox 360 transforming into robots which is fine if all these incidents above happened casually but instead they were very obvious which I felt was tacky.

On a positive note I really enjoyed the acting of the main kid in the movie and the visual effects of the robots was just incredible. The movie was fun to watch but I wouldn’t watch it again. My final score is a 3 out of 5.

It’s really gotten to a point where there isn’t much more that can go wrong. I’ve honestly lost count on how many politicians have gotten assassinated in the past couple of years and its depressing and sickening. I am going down to Beirut next Tuesday for a week long shoot and I hope things get back to normal by then. The last time I had a shoot in Lebanon another politician had gotten assassinated, its becoming fucking routine! [News]

My favorite thing about Ramadan is that I get off work at 3PM. This allows me to have a ton of free time to do stuff I wouldn’t usually do like riding my bicycle.

Yesterday I went riding with Nat and the weather was surprisingly great. We rode from Marina Mall to Scientific Center, a short route since we didn’t want to take a longer one in case our bikes had developed problems after a year of storage. Imagine riding all the way to the Kuwait Towers and then finding out the bike has a problem and you have to walk back all the way to Salmiya. It would suck…

Riding the bicycle is really different from the motorbike. For one thing falling off a bicycle is no longer a big thing. Nat crashed yesterday when her bicycle slid on a curve and she just got up and continued riding. When the same thing happened to me with my motorbike I ended up with road rash, a fractured wrist and a large repair bill.

There are two brands of bikes I would recommend people getting, Trek and Cannondale. I personally prefer and ride Cannondale. When it comes to road bikes I would go with Trek but for mountain bikes Cannondale all the way. The Cannondale dealer is located in Shuwaikh, you take the first right after McDonalds on Canada Dry street and once you reach the small round-a-bout the dealer would be on your right hand corner. Trek on the other hand is available at GoSport in The Avenues and eXtreme Sports at Marina Waves.

If you are looking for a place to ride, the Gulf Road is a good place to start. For a short trail you can start off at Marina Crescent and ride all the way to Scientific Center and back. For a longer trail you can go from McDonalds on the Gulf Road and head all the way to Souk Sharq and back. Both routes use a sea side trail away from dangerous car traffic.

Cannondale have soooo many hot bikes to choose from, my favorite being the Gemini but the prices can get ridiculous with models costing KD1000 and up. You can spend a lot less of course, a member in the forum recently purchase a Trek for only KD148 and you can even get bikes for under KD50 even although I wouldn’t recommend them at all. The difference between the cheap and expensive bikes is usually weight, quality of parts, the frame and the finishing. Cheap bikes are usually heavy, equipped with the crappiest brands and handle like crap.

There used to be a riding club that met up every Friday at like 7AM to go riding but I don’t think they do that anymore. If anyone knows of another riding club please leave it in the comments below.

Just wanted to boast to other video gamers that I am currently downloading the Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer Beta for the Xbox 360. Since I am a gamespot.com member I was given an activation key for the download. Gamespot rules! [Link]

A friend of mine at work just came back from Spain and while there she got me a gift from the Lomography Shop. This reminded me of my Holga camera which I haven’t used since the last time the sky was blue. Shooting outdoor pictures in Kuwait during the summer sucks because we don’t have blue skies neither do we have any clouds. This is why my favorite time of the year to take pictures is during the winter.

Holga is this really cheap camera I bought awhile back which takes pictures using medium format film. Since the camera is cheap the pictures have this really strange feel and effect to them which ends up making all the pictures look really trendy.

I have some pictures I shot with the camera attached to this post which I took 2 years ago at Marina Mall and as you can see you could never achieve the same with a digital camera. Now the coolest thing about the Holga is the price, it costs just $20 on Amazon. Thats a really good deal. [Amazon Link]

So yesterday I was kinda pissed that I forgot my phone in Dubai but now I am actually enjoying it. It’s been a peaceful day so far and although I should be getting my phone back tomorrow via DHL I think I am going to keep it turned off and see how long I can last without it. If I want a pager (beeper) can I still get one here in Kuwait?

I left Geo (my dog) with my parents for one night and this is what my sister did to him! [Link]

Note: This is not the first time… [Link]

In the dumbest move of the year, I forgot my mobile phone in Dubai.

I am going to Dubai tomorrow and coming back Saturday. I really don’t feel like going to Dubai, all I feel like doing is just sleeping in late and then ordering a pizza while I watch some TV on the couch. This would be the third weekend in a row in which I am traveling, but unlike the last two trips, Dubai doesn’t interest me. I won’t be taking my laptop with me and I don’t think I will be moblogging from there either. Last months bill increased nearly 600% from my usual because of my moblogging!

In response to this [Link]

While in London I was able to walk around and discover the city without holding a large map and looking like a tourist because of a simple software I was able to get for my phone called A-Z London Maps. I don’t think I would have been able to enjoy my stay without this incredibly easy to use and practical software.

You don’t need a GPS device and you don’t need to connect to the internet to be able to use the map, the software installs everything onto your phone. To use the software all you need to do is type the name of the street you are in and the software will show you on a detailed map where you are. This helped me a lot since if I needed to find my way back to the hotel I would just check on the map to see where I was and then plan my route. Also if I found a street I liked I could easily find my way back. If I was using a regular paper map it would have taken me ages to find my location on it but with A-Z maps I just type my street and the software instantly circles my location on the map.

There are maps for London, Paris, Dubai, Barcelona, Helsinki and more but they only work on some Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. You don’t need to buy it to try it either, you can download the map and try it out for 30 days before you decide to purchase it.

I only found 2 problems with the software or should I say there are 2 things I would have liked the software to do. The first is the option to work with a GPS device. Although every street corner in London displayed the street name it would have been more practical if the software automatically recognized where I was. The second thing I would have liked would have been the option to search for shop names and then have the software find it for me on the map. Of course thats asking for to much but still, it would have been nice to have.

Final score is a 4 out of 5. If you are interested in the maps you can check out the Lumisoft website for more details and trial downloads. [Link]

One store I fell in love with here in London is called Size?. Size? is a sneaker store but they seem to have the coolest/funkiest collection of sneakers I have seen all in one place. Majority of the sneakers I saw today I had previously only seen on SneakerFreaker.com and DrJays.com. Now I am trying to figure out which sneaker to get, I only want to get two but I have around 10 I like. Some of the sneakers I found and liked are displayed above and below this post.

I am at the Kuwait airport now waiting for my flight to Beirut. I was planning on having breakfast at Fuddruckers but I missed it by 15 minutes (they stop breakfast at 11AM).

Sunkist
A classic, probably the best orange drink ever created.

Frutti
Tasted terrible! I also had what looked like red hair in my drink although I am guessing its supposed to be orange pulp.

Fresh
Tasted better than Frutti but just not good enough to beat Sunkist.

Now on a side note if you look at the orange illustration on the Frutti cup you will notice it resembles the orange on the Sunkist cup. If you also look at the shape of the Fresh cup you will notice it is the same shape as the Sunkist cup. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.