Category: Travel

I think everyone in the Dubai Duty Free figured I lived in Kuwait because I was walking around taking pictures of the bottles of alcohol. Moskovskaya is my favorite brand of vodka. Its the only one I can drink straight up without mixing it with anything.

So I am about to board the plane when the guy who checks the boarding pass takes mine and scribbles over my seat number which was 6F and starts writing another seat number somewhere back in the 20s. So I was like hey how come you are changing my seat? He replied telling me they were trying to balance the plane. While doing that he shook his hand side to side as if representing the plane thats wobbling. I was like o….k….. that can’t be good. So I told the guy listen its not fair if you change my seat now, I don’t want to , he was like fine and scribbled back 6F on my pass. I found this incident very strange.

Just finished checking in to my flight. Airport security today is just overboard. Jazeera Airways and British Airways check in stations are located in the same area and it seems because of British Airways security was extremely tough… not the usual laid back chatting with friends while ignoring the metal detector beeps. I had to actually take off my belt while some other guys were told to remove their shoes. Had to wait over 30 minutes in the security check line. Usually the lack of decent security at the Kuwait Airport pisses me off, but after seeing what good security involves, I am glad we lack security “most of the time”.

Just found out I have to leave to Dubai tomorrow morning for one night which means I will be back on Monday night. I am traveling with Kuwait Airways so pray for me.

update: Luckily Jazeera Airways have a better timed flight, so I am going to be flying with them instead.

Watching Nip/Tuck, browsing the web and chatting with Nat on MSN.

Its just one shock after another here. I was expecting Bahrain Airport to be crap but guess what? They have a really nice Duty Free, I actually prefer it over Dubai’s. The departure area is also huge, and its really packed with people from all over the world. Its feels like an airport in Europe. Internet is also cheap here, 1 hour for 700 Kuwaiti fils. My flight is in an hour.

So after my last post I decided to go check out Seef Mall. I don’t know if its bigger then Marina Mall, I mean the corridors are tighter but it could be longer, anyway thats not what this post is about. I got bored at Seef Mall because it was too similar to Marina Mall, they had the exact same shops which made things really boring.

Anyway I left the place, took a cab and went to Traders Vic. What a place, its total crap. Its like a upper class snobbish restaurant/pub. I soooo hate those places. Reminded me a lot of a couple of places in Lebanon which I hate. Anyway after walking in and not finding a place at the bar to sit I called a cab and was planning on coming back to the hotel. On the way I told the cab driver that I was looking for a pub that wasn’t as upper class, something more down to earth and cool and shit. He told me he would take me to City Center where there are a lot of places and if I dont like one I can go to another. I was like cool pub jumping, I used to do that a lot in Lebanon.

Cab driver drops me off in front of City Center Hotel and tells me to go upstairs. I was like fuck no I am not going into another place like Traders Vic. So I decide to walk around and find my own pub. I find a place called Diggers and I walk in. I was like fuck, this is my place. They were playing rock music and there was a huge bar and the place was filling with British looking guys. I ordered half a pint of Heineken draft beer and started looking around. Then I realized wait, 80% of the occupants were British looking dudes, the other 20% were Asian girls just hanging around in groups around the bar. I was like fuck, these are hookers. How do I know? Because I just know, they were hookers and guys were walking up to them whispering something in their ears then the girls would whisper something back and the guys would walk away. I finished my beer and walked out of the place.

I walk down maybe 10 meters and I see something that looks like an Indian restaurant or something. I don’t know why but I was like let me walk in. I walked in and automatically I realized I had walked into a brothel. Not any brothel mind you, the really low end brothel filled with overweight Indian girls with pimples all over their faces. I turned around and started walking back out when a woman asked me where I was going and I should come in and have a drink. I was like no thank you and walked out.

So then I walked another 10 meters to another place and this place was like a restaurant but had like this asian girl band playing and it was full of Gulf nationals sitting chatting up Asian girls. I again walked out and started walking around the area. I found a massage parlor and I looked through the glass window and guess what I found… Asian shemales just sitting around waiting for customers.

I then spent over an hour walking around the area going into hotels. Each and every hotel I went into had hookers. Each and everyone one of them. One hotel I went to had a different pub on every floor for 4 floors. Each pub was full of hookers but each a different nationality. One floor Asians, one floor Indians, one floor Arabs and one floor African. It was just crazy, I never expected Bahrain to be like this. I went to at least 6 or 8 hotels checking them out and they ALL had hookers. It was just really shocking.

Finally I got bored and really sweaty from all the walking so I found a cab (a pickup truck) and asked him to drop me off at my hotel. It was really fun hotel jumping and seeing all these old European guys trying to get some from all these Asian hookers but it was also really exhausting. I am now back in my hotel room and I am going to ordered some room service. I haven’t had dinner yet.

update: OK what kind of hotel runs out of burgers? I had to order a hotdog off the kids menu. SUCKS!

update 2: I forgot to ask, can anyone recommend a decent pub minus the hookers. I am just looking for a decent place to have some beer and listen to music.

I have to say I have been in Bahrain for like 30 minutes and I am already pretty impressed. Firstly I have a really huge hotel room which is really cool. Secondly there is 1 mall right behind the hotel, another mall right on the side of the hotel and a third mall right in front of the hotel. The one on the side, Seef Mall looks a lot bigger then Marina Mall. On my way to the hotel I found out Bahrain is made up of 33 islands. Why didn’t I know this from before? At night Bahrain is looking like a mini version of Dubai which is again not what I was expecting. Lots of construction and tall cool looking glass office towers. I don’t know why I had a completely different idea on Bahrain, so far it looks like a lot of fun.

Now I need to stop blogging and go get drunk.

I am at the airport now sitting at Mc Cafe drinking some tea. When Nat came back from Lebanon early in the week she came back coughing and with the flu. It seems I am getting sick now. The airport is super packed, never seen it like this before. I am taking Gulf Air to Bahrain which I am not too excited about. I have heard a lot of terrible stuff about Gulf Air and didn’t they also have like a plane or two crash a few years ago?

I am leaving to Bahrain for some work related stuff on Wednesday afternoon and coming back Friday night. Its my first time there so I was checking Lonely Planet to see what there is to do in Bahrain and I couldn’t find anything.

I heard Bahrain has good restaurants does anyone know anything about them? Any recommendations? How about malls, do they have like a shopping mall in Bahrain? Will I actually find something to do or should I expect to spend all my time in the hotel room watching TV?

update: just remembered Michael Jackson lives there now so it can’t be that bad

Mobile phone prices are like the same price as Kuwait. Rent is wayyyyy more expensive. They don’t build one building, they build them in large clusters all at once. Drivers are worst then Kuwait. Girls are all like half naked. Kuwait is greener. Emirates mall is like Marina Mall times ten. They have larger variety of restaurants. Finally, consumers are not treated like idiots, they are valued.

So internet in the room is like 3KD an hour but internet in the lobby is free, so you can guess where I am sitting. Flight was great. Emirates have like 400 or something channels of on demand video. By the time I figured out what I wanted to watch we had already landed. Think I am going to go to “The Agency” now drink some wine and order some sushi from the Japanese restaurant next door.

Two nights stay in Dubai, taking my Eastpak backpack, so whats in the bag?

– PSP with Grand Theft Auto
– iPod Video
– Shure E2 earphones
– Canon A530 camera
– Apple MacBook
– Tooth brush & tooth paste
– Gillete Cool wave antiperspirant
– Cool Water perfume
– 2 tshirts
– 1 pant
– 2 pairs of socks
– 2 CK briefs
– PJs
– Powercables for electronics
– Pills and bandage for my motorbike wounds
– 2 pens
– moleskine notebook

and I think thats all of it. I love this bag.

I am going to be leaving to Dubai tonight for a photoshoot. Should be back Wednesday night. I believe the hotel has internet access so I should be able to post from there.

Hello everyone, my name is Fawaz and I am responsible for marketing communication at Jazeera Airways, in addition to being an amateur blogger of course. We have been reading your questions about Jazeera Airways on this blog over the past few months. Questions that ranged from “how can we afford fares as low as KD 5?” To questions about our brand name. In an effort to answer all your questions, we recently asked Mark to gather questions you had for Jazeera Airways and in return we promised him that we would answer all of them, exclusively on this blog. Lets start

Mark: How can you afford to offer super low fares?

This is a great question that I will answer in two parts. First, we prefer to fly our planes full of travelers paying less per seat rather than flying with less travelers paying more. Other airlines prefer high fares and less passengers, which does not make sense to us. Why would they want to impact less people? For us, we enjoy flying people and being part of their lives.

The second part involves our business model that works to achieve high efficency and a lower operational cost base. In other words, we do more with less. We achieve our high efficiency by employing

1. state of the art technology to streamline processes
2. hardworking, multitasking, highly motivated team

In sum, we can afford super low fares because our business model is based on volume more than yield, and because we depend on leading technologies and great team to lower our cost.

Follow-up: How are you able to lower your cost?

We are able to maintain a lower cost base and high level of quality and safety through three main ways:

1- Recruitment- We recruit highly motivated and committed team members. This is crucial as it has direct impact on day-to-day cost. Being able to wear different ‘hats’ (so to speak) and do the work of several people is a quality we seek in and build in our team members. That’s why we call our people our ‘high flyers’.

2- Aircraft utilization – Aircraft on the ground do not make money, so we keep our aircraft in the air where they do make money. We achieve this through quick turn-arounds at the gate. Our planes arrive at a destination, wait for our travelers to disembark, board return travelers, and fly back to base ready to take off again in less than 45 minutes.

3- A fleet of single-type fleet: the Airbus A320.

If you had Porsche and a Ferrari and Lamborghini in your drive way, you would need three different specialized garages to service them with three different mechanics and three different spare parts inventories. On the other hand, if you had three Porsches you would only need to contract a single garage to service all three and your maintenance costs would be much lower. Aircraft are the same, though much more sophisticated. Allow me to elaborate.

If an airline had an A320, an A310, an A340, and a 777, they would need certified captains, first officers, cabin crew for each type of aircraft. In this case, if a 777 pilot falls sick with the flu, an A320 pilot cannot just jump in the captain’s seat of a 777 unless she is trained on a 777. Because of this, airlines with multiple aircraft types in their fleet need to have more pilots to cover scenarios like this, more engineers who do nothing but wait for someone to get sick, and spare parts inventories to cover all types. This creates redundancies and inneficiency.

In our case, we have an all-A320 fleet. We do not need to hire more crew since any of our crew can jump in any of our aircraft and take-off and any of our engineers is licensed to work on any of our aircraft, and our spare parts inventory covers all our aircraft.

4- Investment in Technology – By investing heavily into technology, we were able to raise efficiency, reduce operational cost and drive the price of tickets down even further. We currently employ over a dozen world class technology systems and tools that range from the booking systems we use to satellite aircraft monitoring that tells us the status and integrity of each aircraft while it is in the air no matter where it is on earth, and automatically dispatches support teams and parts to the destination airport if the situation required. These are only some of the benefits of having world class Lufthansa Technik engineers and technology working with us and for us.