2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003
A completely revamped and organic Burger Boutique is reopening again on October 15th. Burger Boutique used to be one of my favorite burger places before they closed down for an overhaul. They’re still going to be located on the second floor of Arraya Complex in Kuwait City. [Link]
965Malls posted the list above last week but I just saw it now. It’s translated from an Arabic newspaper and it shows the prices of different drugs in Kuwait. [Link]
Note: What I found interesting about the list is the list itself. Since drugs are illegal there is no official price list but this list by the newspaper is kinda like one.
Every now and then I invite different people to write on the blog and last week I asked John Peaveler if he’d be interested to share stories regarding animals and wildlife in Kuwait. John is the managing director of Kuwait Society for the Protection of Animals and Their Habitat (K’S PATH) whom I’ve posted about a number of times before and a groups work I highly support. He’s already got his first post up which you can check below.
[Vimeo]
Working for K’S PATH can be a bit of a roller coaster. I have days when I absolutely love my job, and days I could really live without. One of the worst scenes we regularly encounter is that of neglected horses. I use the word neglected, because they are rarely abandoned until survival is almost impossible. Instead, they are kept, often without shade, food or water for most of the day. They are denied adequate if any veterinary care, and their condition gets worse day by day until the inevitable end finally arrives. The ‘lucky’ horses die where they live. In the worst cases, someone makes a prognosis of hopelessness, and the animal is left in the desert to die without any possible chance of survival; a practice referred to as ‘turning it’s fate over to God.’ With a small sanctuary full of donkeys and horses, and monthly expenses pushing 700KD, K’S PATH has few options to accommodate new horses. The obvious solution is to prevent the animal from being neglected in the first place. We try talking to the owner as politely as we possibly can.
The result is invariably the same: ‘you can’t tell me what to do with my horse.’ And they are right. Their ownership under Kuwait law is absolute, and it would take a brave legal team with no more prominent case to enact Kuwait’s limited cruelty laws. So we do our best. We give them water, and we buy them what food we can afford to give, because we’ve learned over time that when you can’t fix a problem, you can only do all you can, then move on to the next animal.
What do we need to solve this problem?
1. Legal help, in the form of an enforcement and prosecutorial team.
2. A properly sized, equipped, staffed, and funded sanctuary.
3. Education. This we do. Our message? Compassion and kindness.
You can find an equine success story [Here]
Post by John Peaveler
Managing Director
Kuwait Society for the Protection of Animals and Their Habitat
This should be an interesting photography exhibit.
A group exhibition featuring a series of photographs taken by 15 participants of the CAP photography workshop. Led by two members of the Rawiya Collective, Laura Boushnak & Tamara Abdul Hadi, the workshop took place last May in the Mubarakiyah Souq for a duration of two days. It’s main focus was on the old souq, the vendors, the visitors and the stories that can be found in this local public market.
Date: October 10th to 17th, 2012
Location: CAP (Contemporary Art Platform)
The Taj Arabia complex would be much bigger than the original monument to love and include a 300-room hotel, shops and commercial buildings, developer Arun Mehra said.[Source]
Too slow Dubai, we already beat you to it.
I love magazines ever since I can remember. As a kid in the 80s I had a huge ass collection of Smash Hits and I currently have a huge ass collection of WIRED (dating back to 1994 I think). When I first signed up to Shop & Ship back in 2001 I think I signed up to at least 20 magazines.
Slowly slowly though I stopped renewing a lot of them once the iPad got released. I just downloaded and subscribed to all the magazines using Zinio and just left one physical magazine subscription and that was WIRED. But, I’ve just canceled that as well.
With the Kindle and Zinio App on the iPad it really doesn’t make sense to buy print versions of the magazines anymore. Other than the cost of magazines in Kuwait being a lot more than the US and since the cost of shipping magazines from the States has increased over time I finally decided to go completely digital. I’ve always wanted a large bookstore to open here in Kuwait but I think I’ve finally realized now it’s just too late.
If you don’t know what Zinio is check out my previous post on it [Here]
According to the 2012 Happy Planet Index, out of 151 countries researched, Kuwait came in at 143! ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY THREE out of 151! The index uses global data on life expectancy, experienced well-being and Ecological Footprint to calculate this score. The happiest place? Costa Rica. If you want to check out the full ranking as well as more details on how the whole thing is ranked you can download the PDF file from [Here]
Back in 2009 Kuwait was 128 out of 143.
The Guardian published the photo above of Kuwait at night taken from space. The photo was one of many photos captured by the European Space Agency and Nasa satellites last month. The description of the photo says:
A night view of Kuwait City, the coastal city which serves as Kuwait’s political and economic capital. The metropolitan area has a population approaching 2.5 million
Check out The Guardian article [Here]
Below is another photo taken from space back in August also showing Kuwait at nigh. It was previously featured as a NASA image of the day.
NASA have a pretty good writeup on the photo above as well as a higher resolution photo which you can check out [Here]
Thanks Khalid
My friend who was attending a conference in Doha today snapped the picture above. The photo on the bottom right in that presentation is the one below which I shot back in 2005 at the Kuwait Airport. It’s by far the most popular photo I’ve ever taken since it been making its away around the world popping up in different places as an epic fail photo.
Thanks Alex
IKEA are blaming their Saudi franchisee for this botch up. [Link]
Update: Kuwait’s catalogue still contains women
A friend just messaged me telling me an apartment building collapsed in Salmiya near the corner of the Fahaheel Expressway and the 4th Ring Road. Lots of cops and firefighters on the scene.
I don’t have any pictures or information right now other than the above. Hopefully it was an abandoned building and no one was hurt.
Update: One of my readers with more information shared the following
Apparently an old building was being demolished and collapsed sideways on the side building. No one is hurt but authorities are searching as it fell on a temporary room. -NAK
I passed by around 8:30PM, 3 hours after the incident took place and I couldn’t see any fire trucks or police cars on the scene. I did spot the building though which is located right behind Texas Chicken on the 4th Ring Road in Salmiya.
Update2: I added the photo above which was taken by Namastey Kuwait. More photos on their Facebook page [Here]
On Tuesday, the Ministry ordered the ISPs to cut prices by at least 40 percent, slashing the price of an annual subscription for a 1 megabyte per second (mbp) connection to 48 Kuwaiti dinars ($170), while 8 mbps will now cost 200 dinars.
That means Kuwait is considerably cheaper than other Gulf countries; in Bahrain, for example, Batelco charges 120 dinars ($320) annually for a 1 mbp line and 360 dinars for 8 mbps.But that will do little to improve fixed broadband take-up, said Qualitynet’s Kooheji, with Kuwait’s penetration of about 5.5 percent half that of the United Arab Emirates.
“We receive lots of calls from customers who want to upgrade and take the maximum speed for the price available, but they cannot do so,” said Kooheji. “The government should put more effort into improving the telecom infrastructure rather than cutting prices.”
…
Kooheji said only about 15 percent of fixed broadband connections in the country used fibre, with the remainder on copper lines.
If it wasn’t for WiMD I’d still be stuck on a 2Mbps DSL connection with a 256kb uplink. Yet I’d still be one of the lucky ones since at least I have a phone line. Check out the news article on [Yahoo]