Last year I posted about how Traffic Department’s instagram account @traffic_kw was very active and constantly posting videos of car chases and before and after videos of cars that had violated laws and then after they were caught. Over the weekend the Traffic Department posted a video of a tragic incident that took place last Sunday when one of their officers was killed by a reckless driver.
The video is in Arabic but with English subtitles and you can watch it above. It’s pretty sad and makes you aware that the roads aren’t just unsafe for us, but also the cops. A week earlier another police officer was lucky to escape injury when a speeding car hit his parked car. The video of that incident along with the officer recounting his experience can be seen below. We really need to try and figure out how to make our roads safer because it’s not gonna get better by itself.
Back in December, I posted about the Japanese restaurant Kei closing down because the hotel was getting renovated. Since then more details have come out on the project as well as renderings of the new facelifted hotel.
The hotel’s ground floor will be converted to mall use and become a continuation of Salhiya Complex with a dedicated entrance on Shuhada street. There will be an additional 6 stores on the ground floor and 5 more on the mezzanine.
The hotel entrance will still be on the ground floor but the hotel lobby will now be moved up higher into the building, possibly the rooftop.
The entire building exterior will be redone. Although I’m a fan of the current retro exterior, the 40-year-old design does look dated and gloomy.
The project is expected to be completed sometime in 2022.
Back in 1982 during the construction of Entertainment City, two articles were published in the Arab Time supplement magazine with information and photos on the project. The photos and reporting were by the documenter Claudia Farkas Al-Rashoud and you can check them out on twitter in their original size or in a reduced size below.
This new project by Mabanee (the same people behind Avenues) looks like it’s going to be pretty cool located within Jaber Al-Ahmad City.
The comprehensive development will include a modern, architectural design in a community feel, with several components including 276 residential units and facilities and services to accommodate its residents and visitors including parks, schools and a retail component consisting of international retail and F&B brands. Aventura is expected to open during the first half of 2024.
Going by the video it looks like a neighborhood you’d find in Dubai or Europe with proper sidewalks, bike paths everywhere, and lots of greenery. Ah sidewalks, how I wish we had them in my neighborhood.
If you order a laptop from the US or Europe it would generally come with an English-only keyboard. So people who require Arabic get Arabic letters printed or stuck on the keyboard which is fine unless you have a backlit keyboard. If you just printed Arabic letters on a backlit keyboard you wouldn’t be able to see them in the dark so when I found out about laser engraving a few days ago, I was a bit surprised it was something that was so easy to do and also available in Kuwait.
Laser engraving as you can see in the video above basically cuts out the letters on your keys so that the light can pass through them as well. There is a store in Sharq area called Sharq Center which does it and charges KD15 for it. The process takes only 15-20minutes so you don’t have to leave your keyboard or laptop there overnight. If this is a service you’re looking for then check out their Instagram account @sharq_center
I spotted these two banners at 360 Mall this weekend, the first number to dial is if you have a flat tire, the second if you have a dead battery. This is pretty cool and I’m surprised I haven’t seen a similar service in other malls.
One of the reasons I now carry a lithium jump starter in every car is because I’ve previously been in a situation where my car battery died while shopping at Avenues and had to awkwardly find someone to jump-start my car.
Local architect Asseel Al-Ragam has been posting a series of “Simple Fixes” for different parts of Kuwait on Twitter. It really wouldn’t take much to improve the different places and her animated series is a way of showing that.
Geocaching is an outdoor recreational activity, in which participants use a Global Positioning System receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called “geocaches” or “caches”, at specific locations marked by coordinates all over the world.
A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing items for trading, such as toys or trinkets, usually of more sentimental worth than financial.
Someone was asking about geocaching in Kuwait and I hadn’t heard that term in years. The first time I heard about geocaching was back in 2002 and back then GPS devices weren’t as common, Google Maps didn’t exist and phones didn’t have GPS built-in so the only way to find a geocache was using a dedicated GPS device like a Garmin. I faintly remember a geocache located near Radisson Blu and after a bit of researching it turns out it was actually the first geocache in Kuwait.
What’s cool about caches was that you never knew what you’d find and you were always meant to take whatever was inside and then replace it with other items for the next person to find. There still seems to be a bunch of active geocaches in Kuwait so it might be a fun activity to do this Ramadan.
This short clip is from an episode of WWF Tuesday Night Titans that aired back in May of 1985. The wrestler in the clip goes by the ring name The Duke of Dorchester and brags to a young Vince McMahon that he was a huge star on the island of Fulaka.
People thought he made the island up but I’m actually impressed the Duke who’s real name is Pete Doherty even know about Failaka back then considering the Internet didn’t exist.
The photo above is of the first large Al Mailem showroom which they opened back in 1971. Al Mailem if you aren’t aware are one of the largest retailers of tires in Kuwait and they have a whole bunch of locations up and down Canada Dry st.
I’ve actually been trying to find old photos of Canada Dry street from the 60s and 70s but can’t seem to find any and not sure where to look anymore. But, I just thought of an idea while typing this post up of trying and putting together a post with old photos of car dealerships similar to the photo of the first AlBabtain dealership pictured above. If you work at any of the car dealerships in Kuwait please email me!
I remember a time when people were complaining about the lack of bookshops in Kuwait, well things have changed drastically. Below is a list of all the English bookshops I’m aware of in Kuwait. If I missed any let me know in the comments.
I recently found out about a really good Iraqi kebab restaurant in Salmiya which I decided to try out. Iraqi kebab is different from Persian kebab in that it’s generally not as fatty so you don’t have the same strong aftertaste that stays with you the whole day. It’s lighter which is why I prefer it. The restaurant name roughly translates to the “special (or unique) Iraqi kebab restaurant”, and I think they’ve been open since 2016 since that’s when their Instagram account opened up.
It’s a small little place located in the neighborhood that lies between Restaurant Street and Souk Salmiya. I ordered the normal kebab plate which comes with three skewers, grilled tomato and their freshly baked bread. The kebab meat was tender, tasty and didn’t leave any bad aftertaste. The bread which I think is Egyptian or Egyptian style is baked fresh in store.
Two kebab plates and a side of hummus came out to KD5.750. Due to the pandemic dine-in is closed so you’re either gonna have to eat it while it’s nice and hot in the car, or do takeaway. Their Instagram account is @kabab_iraki and here is their location on Google Maps.
KDD just published their Ramadan commercial called “We Love KDD” and I think it’s great (you’re always gonna win me over with nostalgia). If you’re living in the US and want to order KDD Chocolate Milk, check out my previous post here.
Recently I started having lower back pain and after visiting the doctor I decided based on his recommendation to work on improving my posture, mostly when sitting in front of the computer. Like most people, I tend to hunch over the computer and I wanted to stop doing that so the first thing I did was get a posture corrector strap. A posture corrector strap kinda looks like a gun holster you see detectives wear on TV shows under their suits, just minus the gun. Although it did its job in keeping me from slouching, it wasn’t comfortable to wear for long periods, and depending on what you’re wearing, it could be visible.
I then found out about the Upright GO 2 through a friend of mine, a tiny device you stick to your back and monitors your posture. Whenever you start slouching it buzzes. My friend recommended it so I ended up ordering one for myself.
The Upright GO is super easy to set up. All you need to do is attach it to your back and then connect to it via Bluetooth and an app on your phone. You then sit or stand upright and hit the calibrate button in the app and that’s it, you’re set. It takes around a second or two but once the device calibrates it starts recognizing your movement when you slouch or hunch over. Anytime you exceed a certain angle threshold for more than a few seconds, the device buzzes gently to make you aware that hey, you’re hunching over.
The device is really tiny which is why I used my AirPods for scale in these photos. It’s also very lightweight and so whenever I stick it on my back I can’t tell it’s even there. The reusable adhesive on the back of the device uses a medical-grade sticky silicon, and in my case, it lasts for 7 days. After the 7th day, it no longer is as sticky and I swap the adhesive with a new one. The device came with 10 adhesives so it should be good enough for nearly 3 months of use since I don’t wear it on weekends.
Does it work? Yes, it does!
After using it now for two weeks I noticed my posture has improved. Not only that but because I hate the buzzing so much, even when I’m not wearing the Upright GO I still have the fear it will buzz. There is a bit of PTSD involved because even when I’m not wearing the unit, out of habit I expect my back to buzz anytime I hunch over. So I’ve mentally started recognizing when I start to hunch over and right away straighten up.
The Upright with the help of the app tracks your posture throughout the day and in my case, I recognized I am worse when I’m at the office. When I’m home on my computer I have a very ergonomic TOM chair that offers great back support and keeps me sitting up straight. When I’m at the office I sit on a regular chair with no back support so I tend to slouch and hunch over my laptop. But looking at my data over the past couple of weeks I can see that I have improved overall.
There are two versions of the Upright GO, the original version which is larger, has a shorter battery life and cheaper, and the Upright GO 2 which has a longer battery life, is much smaller but also slightly more expensive. I bought the Upright GO 2 for $99 from Amazon but I noticed it’s now selling for $79 and I’ve even seen it as low as $69. An extra pack of adhesives costs $9. If you don’t want to stick it on your back there is a necklace you can buy that attaches to the Upright GO but I haven’t tried it. The Upright comes with a small case that holds an extra adhesive and it’s where you are meant to put the unit when you’re not wearing it. Battery life on the Upright GO 2 is 35 hours so I only charge it once every few days.
The Upright is not something I’d wear for more than a couple of months at a time, it’s a behavioral training device and as I get the hang of not hunching over I’ll stop wearing it. When I see myself starting to hunch over again I’ll star wearing it again. If you want to get one, here is the link to Amazon.
For those of you who didn’t know this, the first school I went to was called Sunshine School back in the 80s. It only went up to primary and my class was the last one to graduate from it back in 1990, just a couple of months before the Iraqi invasion in August. I still have a lot of photos from back when I was in Sunshine School and over the years I’ve been scanning them then sharing them on the blog.
In 1993, Sunshine School reopened as the British School of Kuwait and a couple of years ago (early 2019) I got approached by them asking me if I had more photos I could scan and share. They were working on an anniversary book and the school themselves didn’t have any pictures from the 80s and so were getting in touch with old students to see if they had any. That gave me a good reason to have all my school photos mailed to me by my sister in Lebanon which is why I ended up scanning so many and uploading them online back in 2019.
It took a while but the anniversary book finally got published and I got my copy a few weeks ago. The book was designed and printed in the UK and is really beautifully done. I’ve got a large spread in the book (pictured above) and although the section on BSK pre-invasion isn’t that large, it was great seeing the other photos they had of the school including the staff photo pictured below. I recognize so many of my teachers in it, I kinda wish I knew where they all are now or what they did after they left Kuwait.
Even though I got my copy of the book a while back I didn’t want to post about it until the book went on sale and it just did a few days ago. If you were a Sunshine School student or BSK student, they have a limited number of copies for sale. They’re priced at KD30 each and contain nearly 200 pages of photos, writeups and information on the school. They deliver internationally as well. The book is really well designed and it’s a hardcover so will look great on your bookshelf. If you’re interested in purchasing a copy then click here.
