2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003

According to the instagram account @tafteesh_kw, the government has stated that Entertainment City will be reopening by 2021. There aren’t any other details but I’m assuming the park is set to get renovated during this time.

Originally I heard the plan to renovate the park was put on the back burner after the price of oil plunged below $50 a barrel since the government decided to be more frugal with spending. The aging rides desperately needed an update and by the time the park had closed down, majority of the big rides like the Australian Log Ride and the rollercoasters weren’t working.

There were rumors about Six Flags being involved in the original renovation project, no idea if that is still the case or not but I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Photo by Ahmed Al Bather

Tiger Tiger
Originally a pop-up restaurant, Tiger Tiger is finally opening up a physical location and its going to be located at the end of the same strip where Gia, Joa and Habra are located in Kuwait City. Tiger Tiger will be located where Shisha Bar used to be.

White Robata
The owner of Slider Station and Burger Boutique is opening a robata restaurant at the Sheikh Jaber Al Ahmad Cultural Centre called White Robata.

Sintoho
Opening at the beginning of September, Sintoho will be a fine dining Pan-Asian restaurant that will be located on the rooftop of the soon to open Four Seasons Hotel.

For those of you wondering what that huge plume of smoke in Kuwait City was, according to Al Rai newspaper it was a bunch of tire garages that caught fire. The fire is under control now and no injuries were reported. For more pictures click [Here]

Thanks KamaZX

Forbes released a list of Top 100 Most Powerful Arab Businesswomen and 10 Kuwaiti women made it on the list. UAE had the most amount of women on the list with a total of 16 while the top position went to the Saudi Arabian Lubna S. Olayan. Below are all of the Kuwaiti women who made the list along with their rankings and their job titles:

8 – Shaikha Al Bahar (Deputy Group CEO – NBK)
10- Henadi Al Saleh (Chair – Agility)
15- Eaman Al Roudhan (CEO – Zain)
34 – Hosnia Hashem (Deputy CEO – KPIC)
38 – Suad Hamad Al Saleh Al Homaizy (Board Member – Bank Audi)
46 – Sara Akbar (CEO – Kuwait Energy)
48 – Ghada Y. Al-Amer (Vice President – KUFPEC)
59 – May Al Mudhaf (CEO – National Bank of Abu Dhabi)
73 – Ghosson Al Khaled (Deputy CEO – ACICO)
98 – Nawal Mulla-Hussain (COO – Global Investment House)

To check out the full list and for more details, click [Here]

via BlogBaladi

I’m in California for the next two weeks on vacation so my posting timings will be a bit different from usual. The last time I went on holiday was last September and it was just a week in Bulgaria so I’m really looking forward to this break.

News tips are appreciated a lot more than usual when I’m on holiday so if you have anything interesting for me to share on this blog, send it in!

Timmycatdog (Taymour Khajah) has a new music video out for his track “Flower Power”. The video also features appearances by Mosab, The Goddess Dalal and Turk Himself. If you like the track you can follow Taymour on instagram @timmycatdog

The movies below are now showing at either Cinescape, Grand Cinemas or Sky Cinemas:

New This Week:
Baby Driver (8.3) ♦ ★
FirstBorn (4.9)
London Heist (7.2) ♦
Railroad Tigers (5.9) ♦

Other Movies Showing:
2:22 ♦
Cars 3 (7.2)
Despicable Me 3 (6.6)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (7.0)
Spider-Man: Homecoming (8.2)
The Hunter’s Prayer (5.4)
The Mummy (5.8) ♦ ★
War for the Planet of the Apes (8.5) ★

The movies below are also now showing at the Scientific Center IMAX theater:

A Beautiful Planet 3D (7.9)
Dream Big 3D (7.9)
Humpback Whales 3D (7.2)
Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Secret Ocean 3D (N/A)

The Scientific Center will have discounted tickets for Secret Ocean 3D this weekend up till July 27th because of Shark Week. The discounted ticket price is KD3.

Numbers in brackets refer to the IMDB rating at time of publishing.
★ is for movies I’m interested in. ♦ implies movie might contain censorship.

Splatoon 2 on the Nintendo Switch it out a few days before the official world wide launch. The cheapest I found it out Rihab Complex for was KD20.

This is going to be one of my venting posts on Salmiya. The sidewalks situation on Salem Mubarek Street in Salmiya is a horrible mess. It’s a very pedestrian heavy strip, and probably gets the most amount of foot traffic compared to any other strip in Kuwait, yet the sidewalks are miserable.

There are a number of issues with the sidewalks in Salmiya including:
– lack of wheelchair or stroller friendly sidewalks
– building construction occupying the whole sidewalk
– large bushes taking up the whole sidewalk (pictured above)
– sidewalks that have deteriorated
– sidewalks that were opened up for work but never put back together right

Yesterday I spotted the woman in the photo above with her two kids having to get off the sidewalk and walk in the street because of a large bush. Recently I’ve also been noticing a man in an electric wheelchair roaming around Salmiya occupying the same road as the cars. It’s a total mess but of course nobody cares.

/end rant

Kuwait City 1987. Vintage store front.

Mark Lowey (AbuJack), a construction project management professional and an amateur photographer lived in Kuwait between 1985 and 1988. The past few months he’s been scanning and posting some of the pictures he took during his time in Kuwait (and KSA) on his twitter account. I’ve taken a few of his photos along with the captions and shared them here but you can check out more photos on his twitter account @molowey

High technology in 1987?

A man and his dog, Mangaf Beach, Kuwait in 1988.

Shopping in Fahaheel, 1988.

Jack bin Mark and neighbor friends in Mangaf, Kuwait, 1988. (One cool kid has a sling-shot.)

Toshiba power plant at Mina Al-Zoor in southern Kuwait. Under construction in 1985; nearly completed in 1987.

Kids-R-Us, Kuwait City in 1985.

Interpol released a list of the 24 most wanted Britons in the world and a reader recognized one of them as the child sex offender who previously taught in Kuwait. Paul Meekin whom I posted about back in 2014 was teaching Social Studies at one of the local American schools before he quit and left Kuwait. He was later suspected of using forged documents to teach here and it looks like he still hasn’t been caught.

You can check out all 24 wanted criminals by clicking [Here]

Thanks UCF

Yesterday I dropped by the soon to open Four Seasons Hotel in Kuwait City for a quick tour. I hadn’t been there since back in September when the place was still mostly under construction so I was pretty excited to see how things turned out. My first impressions of the place is that its simply stunning and very tastefully done. It’s has a very contemporary look yet with some Arabic elements injected into the design. It’s going to be by far the best looking hotel in Kuwait.

Four Seasons will be soft launching in around 2 weeks time with the official opening at the beginning of September. From the five restaurants they have, the following three will open up during the soft launch:

Dai Forni – An Italian restaurant
Elements – A buffet restaurant
Al Sour – The lobby lounge

Sintoho the Pan-Asian restaurant and Al Bandar, the poolside lounge/restaurant will both open in September. The outdoor pool will also open in September while the indoor one will be open during the soft launch. Finally, the Aveda salon (for men and women) will also be opening up as part of the soft launch.

I took a few quick photos during my tour which you can check out below. Since I was also taking photos with my phone for my instagram story, I realized later that there were some shots I forgot to take with my regular camera. So check out the photos below and once you’re done head over to my instagram account @mark248am and check out my story there (from your phone). It should be up till around 3PM.

Four Seasons Kuwait is located in Kuwait City [Google Maps]

Update: As of August 14th the hotel has still not opened

I doubt anyone still watches KTV, but if for some very odd reason you feel like watching it, the Ministry of Information has live streams available on their website. All in all there are 8 KTV channels available to stream and you can check them all out [Here]

The popular breakfast spot The Early Bird is expanding with two new locations. The first (pictured above) is going to be located in Central Plaza Salmiya, the same mall that houses International Optics and Costa Coffee.

The second new location and the one I’m interested in is going to be in Crystal Tower in Kuwait City. It’s the same tower as my gym and right across the street from Arabica Coffee.

No idea when they’re opening up.

Movies get censored in Kuwait, thats a fact and no matter how much we complain about it there isn’t anything that can be done. Knowing and accepting movies get censored, how can movie theaters improve the experience for movie goers? One reader proposed an idea recently in the comments and it got me thinking, why haven’t local movie theaters implemented his idea yet?

The reader (Ally) suggested that local movie theaters should start declaring if a movie has been censored or not, and if it has been, then they should declare the duration that was cut and what was cut. So for example:

00:02:45 Censored

Censored content includes:
Reglious themes and/or imagery
Nudity
Sexuality

Right now with my weekly movies list, I check the films content advisory on IMDB, and if I read that there is nudity or scenes of sexuality, I mark the movie on the list that it might contain censorship. But this isn’t accurate and a lot of times movies I marked as not containing censorship ended up being censored. The most accurate way right now to tell if a movie is censored or not is to ask someone who has already watched it, but that isn’t practical obviously.

So Cinescape and Grand Cinemas, if you’re reading this, start being transparent with us, let us know if a movie is censored or not.