2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003

The Kuwait Airport is currently shutdown because a military plane crashed there. I don’t have any more details for now.

Update: Kuwait airport reopened to air traffic [Link]

There is a site I use every now and then to buy CDs from. I usually use it when I want to buy every CD of a certain band for example I got all the Alice in Chains CDs plus all Rage Against the Machine CDs from this site. The site I am talking about is BMGmusic.com. I use them because the CDs are really cheap, you buy 12 CDs for the price of 1. Thats it, no small print filled with traps and no forcing you to buy 6 more CDs in the next 2 years like Columbia House.

I have used them maybe 6 times so far and I usually buy classics like Pearl Jam and Nirvana. Its a practical way of expanding your CD collection… that is if you still collect CDs. 12 CDs for the price of 1, its hard to beat. [Link]

Note: You need an Aramex Shop & Ship mailbox if you are living in Kuwait.

I called 5710000 today (the phone line urgent repairs number), I spoke in English and as soon as someone answered the phone I asked for the manager. The woman (who I was surprised spoke English) asked me why? what was the problem? I told her my phone line has not been working for 2 weeks and you told me it only needed 2 days to fix. She asked for my number and I gave it to her. She then told me that my number has already been tagged to get fixed but the technician hasn’t taken the job. I asked her what can I do then? She told me I could tag your number again or you could wait till it gets fixed. I told her I know of some people who have been waiting for 2 months, she told me this was a different problem. I told her to tag my number again and I would wait and see what happens.

Anyway I spoke to someone who had a phone issue before and he also waited 2 weeks without getting his line fixed. So, what he did was pass by the post office at 7:30AM when all the technicians were standing outside, he pulled one aside and told him if he fixes the phone line for him he would pay him KD5. His phone line got fixed the same day. Tomorrow morning I am going to pass by and try the same thing and hopefully my line will get fixed the same day also.

We took Geo to the Marina Crescent beach tonight. The weather was pretty cold but it didn’t seem to bother him at all. I came to two conclusions today, the first is something I have known for a while now, I am unfit, the second thing is that when Geo grows up he is gonna kick my ass. Geo is a really fast runner, although he is still a puppy he could keep up with me when I was running. If he can keep up with me now I can only imagine how fast he will be once he grows up. Whenever I watch a movie and there is a criminal escaping police dogs I always imagined myself doing better if I was in his spot. Well thats bullshit because I could barely run for 30 seconds before collapsing from exhaustion tonigh. Damn I need to exercise. On our way back to the car Geo saw his friend Bozo, a white Labrador puppy he met on his first beach visit. They played a bit before we had to tell them goodbye and go home.The picture on top is of Geo chasing Nat on the beach.

As I have mentioned before I have a telephone line problem at home. There is no dial tone and its not just me, its nearly everyone in my block. We already called the post office to complain and they told us that a note was written to the technician but he hasn’t picked it up yet. If by Saturday the phone lines aren’t working we should send an official complaint. My parents who live next door have asked around in the area and it seems some people have had the same phone issue for over 2 months now and no technician is coming to fix it. Their complaints are going unheard of and now I am worried my phone line won’t be working for another 2 months also.

What can I do to have my problems solved quickly? Who can I call to complain about this? Is this a helpless cause where I just have to sit and wait for things to get solved by themselves?

I mentioned the other day that Geo my dog will be on a raw meat diet. This means I have to buy him fresh meat every other day and luckily there are 3 butchers near my apartment. The problem I figured I would face buying 1KG of the same meat every other day is the curiosity of the butcher. If I start passing by the butcher every other day, over time I will become a good customer and I am sure he will also want to start a conversation with me and maybe even ask me what I am doing with the meat. I don’t want to tell him the meat is for my dog because I don’t want him to give me the crappiest meat he has. I want the best for Geo and thats why the butcher must never find out the meat will be going to my dog. So I had to create a story in case he does ask me what I will be doing with the meat and its a good thing I did because yesterday he asked.

Around 4 days ago I past by one of the butchers which was recommended to me. It was my first time visiting a butcher but I had spoken to my mum earlier and she told me what to tell him. So I go in and I tell the butcher and I need 1KG of cow meat. I want sirloin, without fat and diced up and split into two packages each containing half a kilo. Five minutes later I walked out with the meat, it cost me KD2.

Yesterday I was planning on going to another butcher so that I could spread out my meat purchases so that I don’t arouse suspicion but my mum recommended I stick to the same butcher all the time that way I can get the best meat. I guess it works like sushi places, the more you visit the better the quality of fish you get. So I went back to the guy and I repeated the same thing I told him last time, except this time he started asking me questions. He was like you want it steak? I was like I want the same thing you gave me last time. He is like but you want it steak? I was like umm, you know chopped up into pieces.. like 2 days ago. He was like what will you use it for? I told him I just started a low carb diet and I am grilling the meat. He was like in that case take the fillet, its a lot better. I was like how much does a kilo cost? He was like KD2.5. I was like no its ok, just give me what I took last time, I don’t want to spend this much money for dinner. He was like listen I will give it to you for KD2, and I am telling you once you have this meat you can’t go back to the other one, you will love it. So he gave me the meat and it looked really good, so red and soft and no fat at all. I paid him KD2 and left.

Geo is really getting the star treatment from Nat. yesterday for breakfast he had 2 boiled eggs and 3 brown toast. For lunch he had chicken with basmati rice and for dinner he had leftovers from lunch followed by honey on toast. Now if she will only start cooking food for me!

Update: I just realized something, the older Geo gets the more food he will eat. What am I gonna tell the butcher when suddenly I am buying 5KG of meat every other day?

Update 2: Fuck I just realized, 5KG of meat every other day means I will be spending KD150 on raw meat a month. Fuck! I miscalulated. Its KD150 if I am feeding him 3 times a day but once he becomes an adult its only once a day meaning KD50 a month which is pretty decent.

Yes its true Stallone said it!

“It’ll be back to back. After I am done with Rocky, I’ll go straight with Rambo.”

[source JoBlo]

Did you know that the breakfast at Fuddruckers airport branch is nearly half the price compared to their seaside branch? That means you can have scrambled eggs with pancakes and sausages for only KD1 instead of the usual price of KD1.750. Everything on their breakfast menu is priced at KD1 at the airport, its a really good deal. Only downside ofcourse is that you have to drive all the way to the airport, but you could turn it into a road trip of a sort…

Note: You also get free internet access at the airport.

Having trouble knowing which Danish brands to boycott? I don’t know why I didn’t realize this earlier but Bang & Olufsen is Danish.. I wonder if their store in Fanar is still open? Anyway I did a bit of research to see if there were other brands I liked that were Danish and I found out that my favorite brand of gum, Stimoral is Danish. I need to check and see if Sultan Center still carry them but I am guessing they aren’t. Here is a nice list of Danish products I found, I don’t know if all of these are available in Kuwait:

Food & Beverages
* Arla Foods – milk and dairy products
* Danish meat
* Carlsberg – beer and softdrinks
* Tuborg – beer and softdrinks
* Suntop – orange drink
* Puck – cheese spread
* 3 Cows – #1 feta cheese in Kuwait
* Dano – powdered milk

Danish design
* Lego – Toys
* Bang & Olufsen – Music systems and televisions
* K.I.S.S. – DVD Recorders
* Stelton – Danish design
* Jacob Jensen – Danish design
* Alfi – Danish design
* Rosendahl – Danish design
* Louis Poulsen – Lightning
* Skagen Watches – Danish watches
* Danish Furniture Online
* Piet Hein – Fritz Hansen furniture
* Arne Jacobsen – Fritz Hansen furniture

Candy
* Toms
* Galle & Jessen
* Stimorol Chewing Gum

Cigarettes
* Prince

Healthcare
* Novo Nordisk – Healthcare

Clothes, textile & Shoes
* H2O
* Jysk – Quilts, pillows, mattresses
* Hummel
* Ecco
* Jaco
* Inwear
* Matinique

Other
* Maersk Sealand – one of the largest shipping companies
* Aqua – pop group (Barbie Girl)

I met Sheikh Nasser Al-Sabah the new PM a couple of times a few years back. He is a really nice guy with a huge passion for cars. He is one of the largest Aston Martin collectors in the world and has a garage with some of the coolest cars ever made. He also enjoys collecting vintage cars and I believe he has the largest collection of those in Kuwait. I always thought it would be cool if Jay Leno met up with Sheikh Nasser to talk about cars on the Tonight Show since Jay Leno also loves cars. I guess that will never happen now that he is PM.

Fight fire with fire? [Link]

Yesterday night around 4AM there was an incredible amount of lightning and thunder. I was awake and was shocked by the amount of lightning, it wasn’t stopping just non stop flashes of light followed by the thunder. A few minutes later it started raining hail followed by some really heavy rain. My friend took a short video of it with his phone, you can’t see much in it but its better then nothing. Its in 3GP format so you need quicktime to view it. [3GP 751KB]

I posted before about the website RefundPlease.com which keeps track of your amazon.com purchases and alerts you incase a product becomes cheaper so you can get a refund. Well I just wanted to say that I have used it for a couple of my purchases and the service works as advertised. I usually also get my refunds within an hour from Amazon, very quick. [Link]

Yesterday evening we took Geo to the Marina Crescent park to meet up with Fadibou and his puppy Mikki. Turns out Geo and Mikki really liked each other and they spent most of the evening playing together on the grass and sand. Only problem is that Geo is 13KG while Mikki is 1.5KG. So Geo was like hurting Mikki accidentally while playing. Anyway we walked further up the beach and met with 3 other puppies. the oldest being 3 months old. All 5 dogs spent around an hour running around playing with each other in the sand. They were 4 males and 1 female but Mikki was the star, all the dogs seemed to want to play with him. Geo had a lot of fun and I was hoping all this playing would get him tired enough to put him to sleep early and I was right.. for a while. Geo ended up going to sleep at 10PM in his fenced off area and we went to sleep right after since both me and Nat hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before. Everything was fine until around 12:30AM we woke up to Geo’s whining and barking. He must have woken up in the middle of the night and realized he was all alone downstairs and he just went ballistic. The book we read said this would happen and that we should leave him alone but he was just too loud. I called up my brother next door and asked him if he could hear Geo and he told me he could very clearly. So not to get in trouble with the neighbours we solved the problem by Nat sleeping on the couch in the living room with Geo on the floor next to her. The living room has hardwood floors so in case Geo decided to “go” during the night it wouldn’t be that a big a problem while our bedroom is carpeted and would be a lot more difficult to clean. So now hopefully next week we will be replacing the carpet in the bedroom with hardwood, that way Geo can sleep with us in the bedroom, the only way we will ever get some sleep..

Geo arrived yesterday night at 12:05AM via KLM. When I had spoken to a KLM representative earlier in the day he told me I needed only 30 minutes to clear Geo once he arrives.. what bullshit. After 2 hours of running around to 6 different locations at the airport cargo terminal and after going and coming between these 6 offices a total of 11 times, I was finally able to clear Geo and take him home. Mind you I was the only one there clearing anything and it took me over 2 hours so you could imagine how painfully long the process would be during the day when every trader in Kuwait is at the cargo terminal clearing their products. All the employees were very nice and tried their best to get all our papers completed asap but its just a lot of stuff that needed to be signed and at full speed it just wasn’t possible to take less then 2 hours. Oh a strange thing, we were sitting at the vets office at the terminal and one guy there was like did you check on your dog, is he alive? I was like no I hadn’t seen my dog yet but what the fuck, do dogs arrive here dead? The guy was like yeah, many times the dog arrives to Kuwait and its dead. I am guessing this happens often during the summer when they keep the dogs locked up in their tiny travel cages for over 2 hours in the hot summer heat waiting for their owners to get all their paperwork done.

Anyway we get home and Geo is all active and shit and wants to play. So we play. We figured he probably just was so bored trapped in his cage and he just wants to let off some steam. So we played with him until 4AM and Geo was still jumping around all excited. We decide to lock him up in his area downstairs and go up and sleep. His area consists of half the bottom floor of our apartment separated by a 1 meter high fence. His area is around 4×6 meters and the floor is covered in vinyl in case he goes to the bathroom indoors the mess would be easier to clean up. So we lock him up and go upstairs and Geo starts to whine which we were expecting. Suddenly he stops and I was thinking wow that was easier then I expected and so I decided to sneak downstairs quietly to watch Geo sleep. So I am standing in the stairway trying to sneak a peak at Geo sleeping but I couldn’t find him in his area. Suddenly I see Geo walking out of the first floor bathroom casually.. he had escaped from his area! So I realized there was a weakness in my fence design and Geo was able to squeeze out from the far side of the fence. I solve that issue by blocking his escape route with his travel cage. I go back upstairs and I am about to go to sleep when suddenly Nat is like “Mark, Geo is here”. He had escaped again! So I went back down and realized he had climbed over his travel cage and then over the fence. So I solved that problem also and on my way up the stairs I look back and I see Geo squeezing out from between two fences. Fucking A thats like 3 prison breaks in 15 minutes. Good thing I don’t design prisons for a living. We decided to solve the fence issue the next day and for the night he could sleep with us in our bedroom. That didn’t work out the way we planned it either. Geo spent the whole night whining wanting to play with us. At around 7AM we all fell asleep. 9AM I wake up to realize Nat and Geo were missing, seemed they both had woken up at 8AM and Nat made him breakfast and took him down for a walk. It was a totally sleepless night.

We spent most of today fixing his fence issue and taking naps whenever we could. I wasn’t able to post more details earlier because I was dead tired but I just woke up from a 30 minute nap and I feel a bit more energized. I spoke to Fadibou on the phone and we will be meeting up with him and his dog Mikki at Marina Crescent later tonight.

Overall I am really glad we got Geo. He turned out to be much more cuter then his pictures had shown him to be and he is also a lot bigger then I expected. He is silly and dumb at times (like yesterday he got introduced to the concept of a glass door after ramming into it 2 times) and loves playing with Amazon boxes. He doesn’t bark and he’s extremely playful. I will record a video of him soon and upload it once I get my DSL connection back at home. For now I just have the picture I posted earlier today.