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I’ve had my eye on the new Porsche Cayman S ever since it got released last year. Along with the Jaguar F-Type Coupe it’s one of the two cars I’ve recently been considering for myself. I’ve actually been building my own Cayman on the Porsche website for the past few months, choosing all the different extra options I wanted, deciding on the exterior color and wheels, a very fun process. They even have the KD265,000 918 Spyder available to customize online. I finally decided I’d take the car for a test drive, that way I could have content for my blog as well as decide if the Cayman S is the car for me.

There are two versions of the Cayman, the regular Cayman and the Cayman S. The biggest difference between the two is the regular Cayman has 275HP while the S has 325HP. I picked up the car on Thursday once I got back from Dubai but was really too tired that day to do much driving. Instead I went to sleep early and woke up Friday morning and headed out to the middle of nowhere. Around 5 or 6 years ago while looking for the “Tank Graveyard” I remembered driving on a two lane paved road in the middle of the desert. I figured it would be a great place to take photos and the drive was far enough to allow me to get a chance to properly drive the car. So I headed out from Salmiya north towards the desert and around 50 minutes later ended up at the road I had been on years ago only now it no longer was a two lane road but a six lane highway. I was disappointed since I had driven all the way with a shot visualized in my head and now I wouldn’t be able to do it. I decided to keep on driving in hopes of finding a new location which I did. After another 15 minutes on that road I found an exit which wasn’t marked on the cars navigation nor on Google Maps and I decided to take it and drive and drive. The weather was great, the sky was beautiful and I finally found a spot that I liked and took all the photos I needed.

The car was a lot of fun to drive and I ended up covering more than 200KM that morning. It made me feel a bit guilty since when I had picked up the car from the dealer it only had around 200KM mileage and here in just one morning I doubled it for them. The engine is mid mounted meaning it’s located behind the drivers seat and in front of the rear wheels. It’s basically the best place to put an engine in the car if you want terrific handling. Because the weight is right behind you its as if the weight is where your body is and so you kinda become one with the car if that makes sense. I think that’s the best way of describing it. The car is pretty compact, there are no rear seats just the driver and passenger seat so driving the car feels like driving a go kart which is why it’s so fun. It’s not intimidating at all and right from the get-go you’ll feel very confident in the drivers seat making it a fairly easy car to drive. The car felt a bit stiff and the steering a bit heavy during normal city driving but once I was out in the open and I was able to step on it, the car felt right at home.

Whenever I used to customize my Cayman S on the Porsche website I’d make sure I would add all the cool sounding sports features like active suspension management (PASM) and torque vectoring (PTV) or say the sports exhaust system. What I realized after driving the test drive model which didn’t have any of those features is that I don’t really need them. The stock exhaust for example sounds pretty quiet when driving around normally but as soon as you give it a kick down it starts screaming. It sounds beautiful the way it is so I don’t think I want to pay an extra KD590 for the sport exhaust system. The car I drove had a horrible red interior, I mean I don’t mind red leather seats if say the rest of the interior is all black to calm it down but the model I drove had red leather everything, seats, doors dashboard, steering just red leather everywhere. Which brings me to another expensive add-on you don’t need, a full blown leather interior, just stick to the leather seats. One feature I would highly recommend is an upgraded sound system. The model I drove had the stock sound system but for most of my music it just sounded too boomy. Luckily Porsche offer two different sound system upgrades, for an extra KD160 you get a slightly better BOSE sound system or do what I would do and splurge and get the Burmester high end system for an extra KD910. Expensive yes but it’s not like you can get a better sound system down the line if you’re not happy with what it originally came with.

I don’t think there was anything I didn’t like about the car. Other than the ugly interior color and the sound system, both of which are easily fixed when building your own car, I think the only other issue I had with the car was storage space. I couldn’t find a place where I could put my phone and have easy access to it. There’s space in the door but then you can’t charge it or you can charge it in the arm rest compartment but then if you get a call or you need your phone you have to open the compartment awkwardly and take out the phone. The car also doesn’t have enough space for a single piece of luggage, the front trunk is too small to fit a full sized bag and so is the rear trunk. The only kind of bag you could fit into the car is a carry on and that’s it.

I’m personally still undecided if I’d get the car or not, I’d have to test drive the F-Type Coupe once it launches in May to decide. But, in this price range the Cayman S and F-Type are still my two favorite choices. The regular Cayman starts at KD16,200 while the S version starts at KD18,300. With all the options I want the car ends up costing like KD24,000. If you want to try building your own Cayman (or any other Porsche for that matter) click [Here]

This is an old post by blogger Crazy in Kuwait but I just saw it last night. The Aladdin house is located in Fintas and Crazy in Kuwait managed to get a tour of it and take picture. Super strange place and you can check out all the photos [Here]

One of my plans for 2014 is to provide you guys with more content. I already have 248PM where I post random things not related to Kuwait, I also recently launched the Events and the Market section and now I’m introducing another section, one that will focus on fashion and lifestyle.

Last year after not being able to find someone to help me run the fashion section (I obviously can’t run it myself), I gave up on the idea completely until a few months back. Through a series of events I came up with the idea of creating a community driven fashion section in which I would invite various brands and people to participate in it. The brands would get exposure and I would get content, a win win situation.

After spending a few months meeting various people and trying to coordinate a synchronized launched, the fashion section is finally officially up. Currently the following brands have already started participating in the section: Al Ostoura, Al Yasra Fashion, 4, Pink Moon, Violet Concept as well as local fashion photographer Jalil Marvin and fashion blogger Joumana Soufi. There are a few more brands and people who will also be joining soon but I couldn’t wait any longer to launch the section.

So check out the section either by clicking on the “Fashion” button in the top navigation strip or by clicking [Here]

If you’re a fashion brand and you’re interested in being part of that section [Email Me]

Nasser Al-Fozaie is a Kuwaiti who is currently living in the Arctic. He emailed me a couple of weeks back and I was curious to why he was there and so he sent me the below to share on the blog:

I’ve always wanted to experience the Arctic. I’m Nasser Al-Fozaie, a twenty-three year-old Kuwaiti, currently conducting sociocultural research and fieldwork on the Greenlandic Inuit society. I dare say life in the Arctic is quite extraordinary and the environment is truly wondrous to behold. The moment I arrived to Nuuk, Greenland, I was greeted by the heavenly whiteness of the city’s mountainous terrain and the rippling waters of Labrador with its gently floating sea ice in all its grace.

I’m currently on my second week and I plan to stay here for the next four months, God willing. I decided to come here because I’ve always been fascinated by Earth’s geographic polar regions and I myself have travelled to many parts of the globe to experience both the physiography and the cultures of the places I visit. I lived in a Fijian village, for example, teaching in a public school and performing environmental initiatives with the locals. I was actually inaugurated into a native Fijian tribe which is way cool. I also went on several solo excursions such as backpacking across New Zealand, trekking the Cornish coast of Southwest England, train-hopping across Eastern Canada and music touring across the United States.

Indeed in order to truly understand something, you will need to put in the effort of exploring and searching for the answers you covet. The esoteric beauty that lies within travel is that it teaches humility and you soon realize how wrong you’ve been living. That said, I don’t necessarily understand why a lot of people are losing confidence in their abilities – they numb themselves through the doleful modus of self-deprecation. They, in perhaps a rather puerile sense, give up on their dreams. They start to imbue a desire for comfort and contentment – average contentment. It’s as if the extraordinary is no longer yearned for or encouraged.

I think many of us in Kuwait are fortunate to be given the opportunity to luxuriate our minds with knowledge and that’s something certainly worth thinking about rather than stressing over which restaurant you’ll dine in today or which car you want to save up for – the Audi or the Jaguar, or whether you should wear Chanel or Valentino tonight. .. and such is the malady of the contemporary indulgent persona. Thus far, I have received exceptional amounts of both academic and moral edification and with God’s help, I will continue to learn and grow.

The Greenlandic Inuit people are quite sophisticated and masters of their trade, having grown from a hunter-gatherer society to a more industrialized community – which has begotten many sociocultural and sociopolitical conflicts, like the pseudo-modernization of the Greenlandic youth and the Danish influences and how it affects the culture, linguistics, politics and economy of this autonomous state. There is so much life out here, one wonders where to begin… so let’s just leave it at this point for now.

If you’re interested you could follow my Arctic adventures on instagram @nasser_alfozaie

After launching in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha, Uber launched in Riyadh earlier today. Uber is a kind of taxi service where you can book a taxi from your phone. I tried it for the first time a few days ago when I was in Paris and I loved it.

The way Uber works is it will show you your location on a map as well as all the drivers in the area as soon as you launch the app. You can then get a price estimate to your destination and if you’re happy with it you can request for a pickup and they’ll send you a driver. Before the driver arrives you can track them to see how far they are, check out their profile as well as well as msg them your ETA in case you’re gonna be a bit late. Finally when they pick you up and drop you off the payment goes through automatically since you connect your paypal or credit card to your Uber account and you also get emailed a full breakdown of the journey including the distance traveled and time (check below).

Now that they launched in Riyadh I really hope they follow up with a launch in Kuwait. Anybody who’s ever taken a cab in Kuwait knows what a headache it can be from finding a cab to negotiating a price and then having to put up with old dirty cars and terrible driving.

It was an amazing (although short) time off from the blog. I’m back in London now so will resume posting as usual.

I’m currently in London and heading out to Paris tomorrow and I’ve decided while I’m there I won’t be posting anything on the blog at all. I will be back to London on the 25th and will resume posting then. So that’s basically 4 days without posting, the longest I’ve gone without posting since back in 2004. I’m taking a much needed break from the blog but I will continue to instagram.

So I hope everyone has a nice holiday, I’m out!

DMcircle is a local event aimed at middle managers and executive managers to network, build connections, share ideas, get inspired and to learn about the latest updates to have better opportunities of growing their businesses. DMcircle was developed by a former boss of mine, Loaay Ahmed who some of you might recognize from his monthly column in Bazaar Magazine “Loaay’s 2 Cents”. I was invited to attend one of their meetings last week and although I kinda forced myself to go, I’m glad I did since the whole experience turned out to be a lot more enjoyable than I was expecting it to be.

The event was held at the Jumeirah Messilah Beach ballroom and when I arrived and signed in I was given a “Hello my name is” sticker to stick on my shirt as well as a card with the table number I should sit on. After picking up my stuff I recognized three people I knew, the manager of Bang & Olufsen, the PR coordinator for the Kei Japanese restaurant and Dr John P. Hayes from GUST who was going to be presenting that night. I chatted with them for a bit until it was time to go into the ballroom.

The event started off with two short videos, one about the Ziferblat Cafe that opened in London, the second was called The Ripple Effect of a Great Work Culture (this one was great, everyone should watch this and it’s a very short video). Once we were done with the two videos there were two presentations, the first one was by John who’s a fantastic presenter. His presentation was called “Leading With Your Personality” and was about figuring out people’s personalities so you could better understand why they respond to you the way they do and why they do what they do. The second presentation was via Skype with Safouane Almansour from San Francisco called “MENA, The New Silicon Valley?”. Very few people know this but Safouane used to work in Kuwait before and was the marketing manager for Alghanim Automotive. He was the one who first approached me back in 2006 and asked me if I would be interested in placing an advertising banner on my blog. He became my first advertiser and made me realize I could generate income by blogging for a living so it was great seeing him again after such a long time even though it was over Skype. Safouane is currently the marketing VP for the Silicon Valley start up, Boca Video.

Once the presentations were done we were told to change tables. The card I received when I first arrived had different table numbers for different parts of the event. For example mine was table #3, than #3 again for the second session and then table #1. This would allow people to mix and mingle with other people at the event instead of just sitting next to the same group the whole time. Once we swapped tables a topic was displayed on the large projection screen and we had to discuss it with the people sitting at our table.

Overall it was an interesting event, one that turned out to be a lot more entertaining than I was expecting it to be. DMcircle is held once a month and they’ve been doing this since back in 2009. The only way to take part in this is if you become a member, your company is a member or you get invited by a member. Membership prices start at around KD220 a year as an individual and higher as a corporation. If you’d like more information on DMcircle you can check out their website [Here]

[YouTube]

Mr.Fari is a Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican musician whom I’ve featured on the blog before with his music video “WebCam Girl“. He’s now being given an amazing chance to win a months stay at a hotel recording studio in Ireland where he would be able to professionally record all his work in the same studio where artists like Muse and Michael Jackson have previously recorded.

Out of over 100 artists in the GCC, Mr.Fari was chosen to be amongst the five finalist to represent Kuwait in The GAP Recording Room competition where he faces other artists from Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE. The video above is one of the songs he’s entered into the competition and to help him win you just need to visit the competition website and share his profile. He’s currently in SECOND place so help him win by watching the video above and sharing his profile at this [Link]

Thank you!

In the past couple of months I introduced a bunch of new things to the blog in an effort to provide you with even more content and entertainment. The first thing I did was create a dedicated Events section late last year and then at the start of this year I introduced the revamped Community. Now I’m introducing the Market.

The Market came about by necessity since the “For Sale” section in the Community became too difficult to manage. So, I shutdown the “For Sale” section there and created this new dedicated classifieds section instead. I had the locally based Orange Jetpack Studios help me get it running and looking the way I want it to and even though there is still room for improvement, I think its ready right now. So check out the Market either by clicking the link in the navigation bar on top or by clicking [Here]

Over the years the blog has become more than just a blog and your expectations of it has also changed. In a couple of days it will be the 9 year anniversary of the blog which is a pretty long time. Awhile back a reader wrote something which I hadn’t thought of before which is that some people started reading the blog while they were still in school, and then continued reading the blog all the way through their university years and now from their jobs. I found that amazing since I never expected to blog for this long. I truly appreciate everyone who reads the blog and from my side I’ll continue to keep finding content that interests you. This is my dream job.

The Sochi Winter Olympics starts later tonight and if you live in the Middle East then you have two ways of watching it.

OSN
If you’re an OSN subscriber you’ll be glad to know that OSN signed a last minute deal to get the rights to broadcast the games. They’ll be broadcasting them over 4 channels – OSN Sports 1 HD, OSN Sports 2 HD, OSN Sports 3 and OSN Sports 4. They will be in HD and have Dolby Digital sound. [Source]

Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU)
If you don’t have an OSN subscription you should still be able to watch the Winter Olympics although not as conveniently (OSN have a TV Guide). The ASBU also acquired the rights to broadcast the 2014 Winter Olympics. According to the ASBU website, Kuwait Television is part of the ASBU group of channels so although I don’t have the KTV schedule I’m guessing they’ll be broadcasting some of the games on the sports channel. If not there are a host of other countries from the Middle East that are part of the ASBU and they all don’t require any subscription. Get the full list [Here]

I’m personally going to mostly be watching curling and luge but the whole schedule of games is available on the Sochi [Website]

Update: According to a reader you can also watch the games on Abu Dhabi Sports.

Good Game is a small boardgames and card games store that belongs to a friend of mine. I posted about them last year just when they were about to open and since then they’ve been pretty busy building a small gaming community which I thought would be interesting to talk about on the blog.

The store carries games like Warhammer 40,000, Magic: The Gathering, Game of Thrones, Settlers of Catan and Lord of the Rings the Living Card Game amongst others. Through out the week they setup various get-togethers were fans of various games can come in and play against other gamers. I passed by last week twice, the first time they were practicing X-Wing Miniatures while the second time they were just setting up for a Warhammer 40K game.

I asked my friend how newcomers could take part in this and he told me you just simply need to show up. Once you pass by them they will get you connected to whatever game you are interested in trying out.

So if you want to be part of this they have a calendar up on their website with the upcoming activities. Mondays are role playing nights, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are different board game nights and every Thursday they do Magic the Gathering drafts. Saturday is open night. Check them out [Here]

A lot of you may not know this but there’s a pretty active “For Sale” section in the blogs Community. There’s always a bunch of random stuff being sold like right now there’s someone selling his Xbox One, someone else is selling their Dreamcast and there is even one person selling tea purchased from Teavana. Check it out over [Here]

[YouTube]

Mr.Fari is a Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican musician whom I’ve featured on the blog before with his music video “WebCam Girl“. He’s now being given an amazing chance to win a months stay at a hotel recording studio in Ireland (who knew such a thing existed) where he would be able to professionally record all his work in the same studio where artists like Muse and Michael Jackson have previously recorded.

Out of over 100 artists in the GCC, Mr.Fari was chosen to be amongst the five finalist to represent Kuwait in The GAP Recording Room competition where he faces other artists from Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE. The video above is one of the songs he’s entered into the competition and to help him win you just need to visit the competition website and share his profile. So help him win by sharing his profile at this [Link]

The P2BK 2014 event launches this coming Thursday January 30th at the Kuwait International Fairgrounds [Map] and will last up untill February 25th. This year the set up is going to be similar to last years with an outdoor old souk that was built specifically to host this event. There will be a ton of Kuwaiti businesses participating including already established ones as well as new ones plus you have the Remal sand sculpting festival taking place alongside it as well. P2BK will be open daily from 10AM to 10PM and for more information you can check out their Instagram account [Here]

On a side note, companies seem to be neglecting their websites and are starting to rely solely on Instragram. I tried to google information on P2BK and all I ended up with was my blog since their website had no information on this years event. And, none of the information was made available in English. Events like this should be advertised to the expat community as well to make sure everyone else is included to share the experience.