Here is another new activity if you’re looking for something new to experience. the Mayadeen Shooting Complex is now offering archery lessons. The lessons are open to every one, men, women, Kuwaitis and expats. The cost is KD7 for 30 minutes and all equipment is supplied. Long term coaching is also available.
Previously, archery lessons were only available to Kuwaitis at the Kuwait Shooting Federation so its great that Mayadeen is now offering it to everyone. For more information check out the Mayadeen Shooting Complex instagram account @mayadeenq8
According to a source of mine, the Kuwait Airways flight attendants will start wearing their new uniforms starting next month. The new uniforms are supposedly by Armani and feature a number of different variations for the crew to choose from. Kuwait Airways posted the picture above on their instagram account but I was also able to get the images below that show the variations. If you’ve got clearer shots let me know since the ones below were photos taken off another phone.
For the past five years, WiMD has been my home internet provider. Before they came about, the fastest connection I could get at my place was 2Mbps so I’m a huge WiMD fan and feel I owe my sanity to them. When I first met them five years ago I was told they were working on setting up a WiFI network all around Kuwait, and now that project is finally launching.
WiMD is launching a new product next month called “Sama” which will cover various areas around Kuwait providing free internet to the public over WiFi. Currently Sama is covering Souk Mubarakiya, Al Shaheed Park and around 8km of ocean front. In the future Sama will cover Al Shaheed Park phase 2, around 40km of ocean front and other various projects around Kuwait.
Sama will officially launch next month but they’re currently testing out the Souk Mubarakiya location and have given me a code to share on the blog so my readers could access the network and try it out. Here is the information required to connect to Sama in Souk Mubarakiya:
Network Name: Sama Mubarakiya
Access Code: 7550682976
This code can be accessed by multiple users at the same time and the login screen will look similar to the screenshot above, depending on the time of day you’ll see a different sky. If you do try it out please share some feedback.
Also a little bit of information. Last year WiMD bought Gulfnet and this Thursday they’re actually launching the new brand for both companies at a private press conference at the Gulfnet head quarters. So I’m looking forward to that as well.
The popular CATS Broadway show is coming to Kuwait next month and will be holding shows at the Sheikh Jaber Al Ahmad Cultural Centre from February 9th to February 12th. The musical just premiered in Dubai last night at the newly opened Dubai Opera and looks like Kuwait will be part of their world tour as well.
Tickets are still not on sale but once they’re available it would be interesting to see how they compare to Dubai which are listed as follows:
Diamond seats in the Dubai Opera are right in front of the stage. If you’re interested in watching CATS here in Kuwait, keep checking the cultural centre website for tickets availability [Here]
Note: After Dubai, CATS is heading to Qatar first and then Kuwait.
Al Busal posts are 100% fictional, satirical and in no way be taken seriously.
An incident was recorded in a famous shopping mall in the Fahaheel area last night as two locals and their wives fought over a disabled parking spot, causing them both grievous bodily harm and permanent disabilities. A report was filed for two counts, including illegal theft and occupancy of disabled parking and fighting.
The concerned authorities were dispatched over the bloody row and arrived to find both parties had been fighting with sticks, egals, handbags and slippers until passers-by intervened and stopped the fighting by immediately brandishing guns and shooting in the air until the situation was under control. A small boy was injured nearby by a stray bullet but was treated by emergency services and only suffered minor injuries along with no sight in his right eye.
The standoff occurred when one side claimed to have more right to park in the spot due to their significant other being too heavy to walk too much and needed the close spot. The other local denied the claim by the first party stating that it was “impossible” since his wife was for sure heavier because “she just eat dinner”, the argument then escalated to dangerous levels.
Authorities are issuing serious warnings to all citizens that disability parking theft has increased to alarming levels since the beginning of this year and the only-serious offenders will face major penalties that include a stern talk and a possible KD5 fine for locals, while expats will receive a 2 year jail sentence and deportation for this heinous crime.
Whenever I meet people, a common question I’m usually asked is how I find stuff to write about every day. There really isn’t that much generally going on in Kuwait so it’s hard to imagine how I could find content on a daily basis to write about. Up until a few years ago I used to think I was just getting lucky everyday finding content but then someone made me realize that after all these years its probably a skill and not luck. I guess my curious and nosy nature combined with my obsessive tendencies turned out to be a perfect combo to run a blog.
There are generally two main ways I find things to write about:
1) People email me or tell me about something
2) I discover things myself while going about my day to day routine
The first thing I do when I find a topic to write about is enter it into Evernote. My memory is terrible and my blog is very important for me so I can’t risk forgetting a topic. I like Evernote because I have it open on all my computers at home and work as well as on my phone. Anytime I add a topic to my list it synchronizes across all my computers and phone. I took a screenshot of part of my current Evernote list (pictured below) to give you an idea of how it looks like. It might look vague but I just need a word or two to remind me of the topic.
Every morning I get up around 8-9 and open my list and decide what I am going to write about. Usually the further down the list the item is the less important it is or the less time sensitive it is. If its not time sensitive like the note “salmiya 1976” which is a video from 1976 that shows old Salmiya, then I just leave it for a slow news day. A slow news day is a day when I don’t have much to post about either because I’m still waiting on some info or because I don’t think I have a quality post for the day.
Today for example I want to post about two things, “CRL Bar” which is a new cereal bar that opened up in Kuwait and “wifi kuwait” which is a project to provide wifi all over Kuwait. For both of these posts I’m still waiting on some information so they’re not ready hence why I am here writing this post which is sort of a blog filler. I came up with this post idea to keep things moving along on the blog until I get the information I need for the other two posts.
Another popular question I get is how do I decide what restaurants to write about or what event to go to. The events part is pretty easy, if I think it’s going to be fun for me or if the subject interests me then I’ll go. 99% of the time I don’t go to any event. With restaurants, its more tricky. I get emailed by restaurant owners all the time asking me to come by and try their place but unless its an interesting or new concept, I tend not be interested. I also go to restaurants based on word of mouth or the chef behind the concept. So for example when I heard Faisal Al Nashmi was opening a new restaurant called Table Otto, I wanted to go try it out because I love his other concept Street. But with HABRA for example, I wasn’t interested in trying it out until I started hearing how great it was from all my friends.
Time wise I generally don’t spend a lot of it writing. I kinda pre-write posts in my head and then sit down on the computer in the morning and type them out. I always feel like I’m working against the clock so I’m always rushing my posts out and generally spend anywhere from 15 to 60 minutes writing them up. I don’t feel like I have the luxury of sitting and perfecting a post because I need to have content out every single day. I run the blog as if I am competing with other hundreds of other blogs and I need to get my posts out right away before they do. Even though there aren’t any other blogs around today anymore, I still blog as if there so I stay on my toes. I still go by the idiom “You snooze you lose” since it used to happen before where I’d sleep on a post and then another blogger would write about it before me.
So there you have it, a behind the scenes look into the making of my posts. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.
I found the video above last week by mistake while looking for something else and here is a summary of the incident according to Wikipedia:
On 7 February 1974, Palestinian militants occupied the Japanese embassy in Kuwait City, taking the ambassador and ten others hostage. The militants’ motive was to support the Japanese Red Army members and Palestinian militants who were holding hostages on a Singaporean ferry in what is known as the Laju incident. Ultimately, the hostages were released, and the guerillas allowed to fly to Aden.
What interested me the most was the Japanese embassy building shown in the film above, is it still around? Where is that? It kinda seems like its near the graveyard behind Salhiya but I don’t recall seeing this building before.
PantryBee are linking up with RAW Sushi Bar and Mimi (of ShakShooka and The Secret Garden) for a one time cooking class and dinner for 12 people. PantryBee are launching their Korean BBQ Box in collaboration with Mimi at the end of the week so this is a mini pre-launch event.
Attendee will learn how to make basic Korean sauces, fried garlic slivers, sushi rice, and cook their bulgogi as they eat it in true Korean BBQ style. The evening will be broken down as follows:
– Cooking demo by Mimi
– Prep & Dinner
– Dessert by Raw
The event takes place tomorrow Monday at 6PM. The value of ticket is KD25 and they’re all sold out but, 248AM has teamed up with PantryBee to giveaway one ticket to a lucky winner. All you need to do to enter the draw is leave a comment below mentioning the name of the brand above that has a bee as their logo.
I will stop accepting entries in the comments section tonight at 9PM and then randomly choose one winner and notify them via email. Good Luck.
Rules: Only one entry per person and please make sure you use a working email since the winner will be contacted by email. If winner doesn’t respond by noon tomorrow, another winner will be randomly chosen.
Update: I closed the comments a bit later than 9PM and there were 91 comments. Using random.org drew a number between 1 and 91 which was 77. So Farheen check your email.
Update2: The winner got in touch with me but can’t make it tonight. So I drew a second number using random.org and it was 15. So Marla check your email.
Bloomingdale’s will be opening at 360 Mall next month on February 1st. They posted a small animated video on the Bloomingdale’s Middle East instagram account announcing this date so it’s official. You can check it out [Here]
If you’re the curious type then you can also find some images of things taking place ahead of the launch by browsing through the hashtags #bloomiesloveskuwait or #bloomingdaleskuwait where people connected to the launch have been posting pictures.
Just a reminder, unlike in Dubai, Bloomingdale’s Kuwait will not have any menswear.
Update: Due to technical issues the launch has now been pushed back to March.
A few cool things taking place this weekend. There is the Kuwait Motor Show at 360 Mall starting today, you have AlSouq Market in Murouj tomorrow, you also have the Burgan Marathon Village opening tomorrow with live music all day before the main Spark Marathon on Saturday (Today is the last day to register!). Finally if you’re a Magic: The Gathering fan, there is a prerelease event taking place midnight on Saturday (so late Friday night) till 5AM at Good Game. Check out the full list of this weekends events below:
Yesterday I was trying to find an article I had posted about an event that took place in Kuwait back in 1974. A friend of mine works right next to Souk Al Kabeer in Kuwait City and I thought she would be interested to know that during the construction of the building back in 74, it collapsed during the night while the construction workers were asleep and killed I believe around 40 or 50 people (I think?). I couldn’t find the article but the video above is taken from the AP archive shot that morning showing the aftermath.
I was flipping page by page through my 50s to 90s category on the blog trying to find the article and I couldn’t for some reason. But, I did realize something important, a lot of the videos of old Kuwait I had linked to or a lot of links to photo galleries of old Kuwait on other websites or blogs were now dead and no longer available.
It’s rare and difficult enough finding these treasures and so its pretty sad that many of them are no longer available to view. I was pissed off at myself and disappointed that I didn’t think of downloading or saving backups or hosting the images myself. I always considered it bad etiquette to find images on another blog and then host them all myself, I thought the proper thing to do would be to link back to the blog instead and send people there. Now I regret doing that, I shouldn’t trust other people with the responsibility of archiving history.
I should set up a gofundme where all the money we collect will be used towards purchasing old 1930s to 1970s archive footage of Kuwait
Thinking out loud I tweeted that I should probably set up a GoFundMe account where all the money collected would be used to purchase old footage and photos of Kuwait from the likes of Huntley Film Archives, Periscope Film, AP Archive, various Flickr accounts and the likes and then store them somewhere in the cloud for everyone to access and where it could remain permanently.
But then we’re back in the same situation, where you’re trusting a person (in this case me) to maintain and keep this archive, but what if something happens to me? Say for example one day while driving down the Gulf Road and my Datsun bursts into flames and I die, that means I won’t be able to continue to pay for hosting and maintaining that archive. Actually thats whats going to happen with my blog as well, probably stay up a month or two after I die, and then it would disappear forever along with the 10,000+ posts and over 200,000 of your comments.
This is why I think there needs to be a non profit organization that is responsible for archiving these important items. And I’m not talking about historically important films and artifacts, I’m talking about general random everyday stuff that people wouldn’t think of archiving from old Hardees ads to some guys family photos from the 60s (they’re wonderful). They don’t sound like very important items to archive but I personally think they are. They’re everyday life from a different era.
There actually might be a local organization that is doing this and I’m just not aware of it but I doubt it. KOC have a great in-house archive department which is extremely organized and one I’ve visited and written about [Here], but they are archiving their own content and not other peoples.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is an organization needs to be established and if anyone ever decides to do it then please invite me to be part of it. For now I’m going to spend this weekend skimming through my old 50s to 90s posts and make sure everything I’ve linked to I’ve also mirrored on my blog so if the source is dead the information is still here.
Last week a giraffe at the Kuwait Zoo gave birth, but the sex of the giraffe was still unknown when I posted about it since the giraffe had just given birth and the zoo keepers couldn’t get close and touch the giraffe until it had started nursing. Well now that a week has passed I figured I’d post a small update, the giraffe turned out to be male and the zoo has decided to name him Mishary.
Trip Advisor released a world map highlighting every country’s top tourist attraction and according to the map Avenues is Kuwait’s top tourist attraction. The map uses data from their ‘Thing to Do’ list and Avenues is rated the highest on the Kuwait list. Check out the full map in high resolution [Here]
Page Turner is a local online based store that specializes in selling must reads books and bestsellers. Their collection isn’t huge by any means with their “Fiction” section being the largest, but you could look at it as quality over quantity. They also buy used books although I have no idea where they’re listed on their website. In any case if you’re looking to buy real books and don’t have a Kindle, this could be a good source. Check them out [Here]
