Category: Personal

Today was pretty straight forward. Just drove around the parking lot for an hour. Its was pretty uneventful until I had my first fall. Don’t think its counted as a fall since the bike fell while I was still left standing. I was turning a curve slowly, I think a bit too slowly and the bike just fell down right under me. Luckily it was dark so it wasn’t that embarrassing…

Today I had my second riding lesson and it went really well, much better then I imagined it would go. Yesterday I was stalling on the bike a lot except near the end of the lesson where I finally managed to get things right. Today I managed to start off exactly where I left off yesterday which was really good. I was taking off without stalling and I even started shifting. Everything just got wayyy easier today and I was having a lot of fun just driving around the parking lot stopping and going, just getting the hand of riding. The hardest part of my lesson today was actually learning how to use the turn signals, it just made my life mor confusing.

Anyway at this rate by the end of the week I should be ready to take the driving test next week. I actually think I could pass the test now since I heard the test is easy, but, I would rather get as much riding as possible in this parking lot before I go out into the streets. Tomorrow is my third lesson.

Today I had my first riding lesson. It was really cool because I got there and there were two training motorbikes, two mechanics, this cool American biker called Kevin AND Jafar Behbahani, the owner of TriStar where I got my bike from. I had heard a lot about him and how cool a guy he was so meeting him was like really great. He spent the first half of the course teaching me how to ride but then had to leave for a meeting but Kevin continued in his place.

My lesson didn’t go that bad. I was stalling a lot in the beginning but near the end of my lesson I started getting the hang of it. My left hand and right hand can not coordinate together which is what made my lesson difficult. Its hard for me to do one thing with one hand and a different thing with my other hand, but they told me with practice I will get the hang of it and I can’t wait till that day comes. My second lesson is tomorrow, I am going to try to finish up all my lessons very quickly so I can get my license ASAP.

I really have to say I am extremely impressed with TriStar, Marzouq had told me before about how good they were and thats why he had recommended I get my bike from them but I didn’t think they would be this good. They are real professionals. If anyone is interested in a Ducati, KTM or BMW motorbikes, new or used then you should pass by them or give them a call. They are located in Kuwait City, at the end of the Istiklal freeway, opposite Al Khaleejiah Complex. You can call them on 2405194 (ask for Salem) or visit their website on tristarkw.com.

Tomorrow is my second lesson, should be really fun.

Today I finally have my first biking lesson. It really sucks having a bike and not being able to ride it and now I can’t wait till I finally get my license. Since I am going to the lesson right after work I have my helmet, gloves and jacket in the car. I am also wearing my biking boots which are the Alpinestars Stroke shoes. They are pretty cool and they don’t look half bad either. They also make me feel like a biker even though I still don’t know how to ride a bike which is pretty lame.

The weather is getting really better really quickly. I can’t wait till Ramadan starts since the roads would get deserted at around 5:30pm which would be perfect for a newbie biker since I can fuck up and not have to worry about getting run over.

I got the Crest White Strips Premium earlier in the month so I could try them out and post my experience. Thing is I never took a before picture so I could compare the color of my teeth before I used the strips. I should have done it because I really can’t see a difference in the color of my teeth although Nat thinks they are whiter now. Maybe they are whiter but not as white as I expected them to be.

Since I don’t have a picture of how my teeth was before I really can’t make a fair review of the product. But if I was to use my memory I would have to say the Crest White Strips didn’t do as much as I expected them to do. Maybe my expectations too high since I was expecting my teeth to be a brilliant movie star white after just 7 days but the result turned out a lot less glamorous.

Putting on the strips was a bit of a pain and once you do get them on you need to leave them on for 30 minutes. I can imagine people with small mouths might have a hard time trying to fit their fingers and the strips into their mouth. Once you put both the upper and lower strip on you suddenly start building up saliva in your mouth. You can’t swallow because the swallowing action might move the strips off your teeth. You can’t spit out the saliva for the same reason. You can’t talk at all and after 30 minutes your lips get really really dry because you can’t moisten them. I spent most of the time lying down on the couch with my head tilted back watching 30 minute sitcoms. Once the 30 minutes are up removing the strips are really easy and you just wash out your mouth with water.

Would I recommend the strips? Yes I would because they are only KD12.5 which is a small fraction of the cost if you wanted to do it professionally at the dentist. You can either pay 100KD or something of the sort and whiten your teeth at the evil dentist or, pay KD12.5 and test your luck out with these Crest strips on the comfort of your couch while watching a rerun of Seinfeld. And hey, if it doesn’t get as white as you were expecting them to get you can always buy another pack and go through the whole process again. Final score is a 4 out of 5, anything beats going to the dentist.

I complain too much, anyone who visits this site often will know that. I complain so much that its actually become part of my sites identity and thats not a good thing because I don’t want to be known as Mark, the guy who complains a lot. Not only that but my blog is also starting to get me in trouble.

So far in the past year my boss at work for example has been contacted four times by different companies I had complained about complaining to him about how I have been complaining about them. Luckily, my boss has been very understanding plus these issues just keep getting him more intrigued by this blog thing. But, I have also been pushing my luck.

For me, my blog world is a complete separate entity from my work world. But in reality they are not separate entities because I am not anonymous. I am the same person that goes to work every morning and also posts here at night. I chose not to be anonymous.

This is why I have decided I will no longer be complaining about large multimillion dollar corporations. You can call me a sell out, you can call me a chicken but in the end of the day you are not in my shoes. The blog is only a hobby and its not worth me losing my job, getting sued or getting arrested over. I just went through my blog and deleted a lot of posts which I believe at one point in the future can get me in trouble with the lawyers. So if anything is missing, now you know why.

Say hello to the new nicer me…

I am a big chocolate spread fan and the most common brands I get are Nutella, Crumpy and Hazella but mostly I just get the large Nutella jar. I tried the Galaxy chocolate spread but I just found it tooo sweet. So the other week I was at Sultan Center in Salmiya and I found a new brand of chocolate spread, the famous Neuhaus from Belgium. I was like gourmet chocolate spread? I have to try it! So, I went and purchased a jar of Neuhaus Chocolate Spread with Nuts and went back home to try it.

Was it any good? No question about it, the Neuhaus chocolate spread was the most flavored chocolate spread I have ever tried. Its thick and smells nutty plus the presentation of it is very minimal and elegant. Its really delicious. I never doubted the fact that it would taste really good, the only question is… is it worth it?

The 750-grams Nutella jar costs 915fils. The 200-grams Neuhaus jar costs KD2,780. That means the Neuhaus chocolate spread costs more then 11 times the price of Nutella, but is it 11 times better?

Simply no, it isn’t.

I can’t even imagine what Nutella times 11 would taste like but I am pretty sure it must be close to orgasmic and although the Neuhaus spread is really fucking good its no where near orgasmic. So would I recommend it? Yes I would, at-least to try it once. But I wouldn’t recommend it as a replacement to Nutella, its just not feasible, what you get is something better then Nutella but not something that deserves to be eleven times as expensive. This is why for the final rating it gets a 3.5 out of 5.

Yesterday after work I decided I would pass by Bader Al Badoor for a quick bite to eat. Once I got their though I changed my mind and decided I would try the other shawerma place opposite to it. A friend of mine told me they had better shawermas so I figured I would give it a shot and see.

After trying Al-Ghader and Badar Al Badoor’s shawerma, Burgan was a disappointment. First the place seems to be the least clean out of the three. The interior was very small and even though it wasn’t that packed I still found it difficult to get to the cashier who was tucked away in a corner behind a Pepsi fridge. The employees also didn’t seem the cleanest or the most organized compared to Al-Ghader and Bader Al Badoor. There was a brief argument for example that broke out with the shawerma guy and one of the employees, the employee originally told the shawerma guy 2 shawermas but then gave him a paper saying 6 shawermas because the customer had requested more. The shawerma guy didn’t read the paper and just went and did 2 shawermas. So they were arguing for like 5 minutes on whose fault it was while the customer was outside waiting in his car for his order.

After a brief wait I picked up my shawermas and a can of coke and headed to the car to eat. Its not hard to make a good shawerma, as long as its not greasy, you use good bread and you make sure the garlic doesnt taste like mayonnaise then you have yourself a good shawerma. But, from a good shawerma to a great shawerma it takes a lot more then that and this is where Burgan fails to deliver. While Badar Al Badoor and Al-Ghader both had neutral tasting chicken in their shawerma’s, Burgan trys to be different by giving the chicken some flavor. If you actually look closely at the chicken shawerma skewer you will notice the chicken has what looks like red spice on it. This is what gives Burgan’s chicken this extra touch of flavor but with me at-least this addition of theirs backfired because I didn’t like it. Its not so bad that I wouldn’t eat it, I don’t think I have ever come across a shawerma that I wouldn’t eat but it does make me prefer Badar Al Badoor which is just across the street from them.

Burgan’s quantity of chicken is good, they are not stingy, their Pepsi was also freezing cold but the chicken just tasted strange and the garlic wasn’t strong enough to cover the taste. The shawerma costs 250fils which is standard for a place like this. The final score is a 3 out of 5.

Need directions? Follow Badar Al Badoor’s [Link]

Dunkin Donuts is addictive and it should be banned!

My motorbike lessons don’t start until next week and I have had my bike for two weeks now and its really frustrating not being able to ride it. Since I know how to drive a manual stick car, and I also know how to ride a bicycle, I decided to go ahead and try to ride my bike since I figured it can’t be too different from driving a stick shift and balancing it can’t be too different from a bicycle.

So around 30 minutes ago I headed down to the parking lot and turned on my bike and tried to ride it. The first 6 times I tried to drive off I ended up stalling the bike. I was releasing the clutch too early I think because as soon as I gave it some gas and moved like a centimeter the bike would stall. Finally I got the hang of it and was able to release the clutch right and my bike took off! I drove the length of my parking the whole time expecting the bike to stall with me but it never did. Once I got to the end I did a u-turn and headed back and then started driving up to higher floors of the parking. It was really cool and I loved the accelaration.

I stayed in first gear the whole time and I was able to speed up a bit and then brake with my hand when I realized I was actually riding the motorbike as if I was riding my bicycle. I wasn’t using the foot brake which I am guessing I should have been using because my braking wasn’t very smooth, I also wasn’t changing gears because I didn’t know what would happen if the bike stalled while I was moving or if the brakes would continue to work with the bike off. For my first time riding (if I can call it that) I think I did pretty good. I think I will go back down later and try riding some more and maybe even try shifting. I am really having fun with this although I am not doing much.

I am looking at the symptoms and I have 4 out of 6… [Link]

Yesterday while at Sultan Center I picked up a box of Crest White Strips Premium. I don’t like going to the dentist so I decided this was a better way to whiten my teeth. The way these strips work is twice a day for 7 days you put this film over your teeth that contains a gel for 30 minutes. After 7 days your teeth become really white. Sounds too good to be true but I read a lot of online reviews and they all seem to say that it works.

I put them on today morning before I left for work since by the time I get dressed, and drive to work its a perfect 30 minutes. It was a really strange experience. First you better hope no one talks to you while you have the strips on and no one calls you because you can’t talk with these things on. The second thing I noticed is the saliva build up. Its like being at the dentist except without the suction tube which sucks.

I am going to take a “before” picture once I get home. I won’t post it online cuz that would be gross but I will take the shot for myself just so I can have something to compare to after 7 days and then post my findings here.

I passed by Dunkin Donuts earlier tonight. I wasn’t planning to since I imagined the place to be extremely packed as it was the opening night but as I was on my way to Sultan Center I decided to pass by and check it out. As I was walking towards Dunkin I was expecting to find a long queue outside the place of people wanting to get in. Surprisingly there was no queue, in fact, there was no queue inside even. I guess not many people care about it here in Kuwait which isn’t a good sign considering Dunkin Donuts opened up in the most jinxed place on that street. Tons of places ranging from restaurants to a music shop opened and closed in that location numerous times giving it the jinxed title.

First the good news, the donuts taste great, they taste exactly like Dunkin Donuts anywhere else. Thats the only thing positive I could think of, so lets get started with the negatives. I go to Dunkin Donuts not for their donuts but for their amazing sandwiches, my favorite being the egg, cheese and ham in croissant heated up in the microwave. They don’t have it here! Its probably not a big deal for like 99% of their customers but I was really disappointed, its the only thing I used to have there. Other then that the Pepsi comes in cans which sucks, not only that but its the small 250ml cans even! They also had a DJ for some odd reason and he was playing Arabic music! Finally probably the worst thing is that they are not open 24 hours! They open from 7AM to 1AM meaning no passing by at 2:48AM for late night munchies.

So for first impression it wasn’t very positive but they did just open today so I am sure they are still working on stuff like buying a regular coke machine. Price for a donut is 350fils. For 1KD you get 2 donuts and a coffee. I am definitely going back there again and I hope in the future they do start making the egg cheese and ham sandwich.

Don’t usually respond to tags but I have been wanting to do something similar to this for a while now.

Row 1, Left to Right:
– Latest issue of Campaign ME
– Apple MacBook with Waterfield laptop sleeve
– Waterfield Vertigo bag

Row 2, Left to Right:
– iPod Video with Foof
– AKG K81 headphones
– Two plain pocket sized moleskines
– Purell Hand Sanitizer
– Two Duracell AA batteries
– Canon A530 digital camera

Row 3, Left to Right:
– Two Imation blank CDs
– 4 pens each for a different purpose
– Swiss Army Knife
– Orla Kiely pouch
– Motorola V3x

Row 4, Left to Right:
– Oakley shades
– Ducati keys
– SD and microSD cards
– iPod cable
– Generic USB cable

Just finished watching the final episode of Six Feet Under and it has to be the saddest and most emotionally charged ending to any TV show. We have been watching Six Feet Under daily for the past 2 months now so we have gotten very attached to all the characters on the show. To finally finish the show and not have anymore to watch feels very depressing. It always sucks finishing a show but it never felt this bad. Now that its over I think Six Feet Under is definitely my favorite TV show ever.