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Lola et moi emailed me to tell me that Discovery Mall has now officially opened. The mall is located next to the ice skating ring rink in Kuwait City and caters to kids. One thing I don’t like about the place is the fact there are only three restaurants and they are Nathan’s, KFC and Chili’s. With obesity being such a major issue here in Kuwait you would think that the restaurants at a kids mall would be more healthy. The picture above is from the new Lola et moi store at Discovery but if you want to see pictures of the mall check out the Kuwait Black Market blog by clicking [Here]

Nat and I work in Kuwait but unless noted otherwise, our posts are never related to our professional and confidential situations or linked to our employers in any way. This distinction must remain clear. This blog is intended to provide a semi-permanent point in time snapshot and manifestation of the various memes running around in our brains, and as such any thoughts and opinions expressed within out-of-date posts may not be the same, nor even similar, to those we may hold today. Feel free to challenge us, disagree with us, or tell us we’re completely nuts in the comments section of each blog entry, but we reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason whatsoever (abusive, profane, rude, or anonymous comments) – so keep it polite, please. If we post something here that you find helpful or interesting, then that’s great; but when push comes to shove, this is our personal blog. The views and opinions expressed on these pages are ours and ours alone and not those of our employer. We have absolutely no, zero, nada, intention to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, business, company, individual or anyone or thing, especially those with the ability and desire to fight back. Oh, and just in case, if we say something stupid in the future (and for which we humbly apologize in advance), it’s better to be able to point out that the stupidity is ours, and ours alone.

– Mark

I have a confession to make, when I see a KFC ad on the street I feel like having KFC, when I see a Hardees flier in the newspaper I feel like having Hardees, when I read about food I want to have whatever I am reading about and thats what happened to me earlier tonight. Although I had a Smoke House burger for lunch, I was reading my favorite hamburger blog called Hamburger America when I read about how ketchup in burgers is for kids and how mustard is the way to go. I am a big fan of ketchup in my burgers but I wanted to try it with just mustard so I decided to pass by Johnny Rockets and ordered a cheese burger with just mustard. Turned out it was really good and I think I might be having my burgers like this more often. No lettuce, no tomato, no onions, just cheese and mustard. If you’re a burger fan check out Hamburger America, he’s got tons of nice burger shots all over the blog. [Link]

Kuweet.com is like KuwaitBlogs.com except instead of tracking local blogs it tracks local tweeters. A lot of people in Kuwait have recently jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon including politicians so Kuweet is a nice site to be able to keep track of all their tweets without needing to have your own twitter account.

What is twitter? I think the easiest explanation is that its like blogs except every post is limited to just 140 characters.. perfect for people who don’t enjoy or have the time to read a lot of long posts. [Link]

Note: If you have a twitter account and want to be added to Kuwait just follow @Kuweet

I found this video while checking out the 11th Street blog and I couldn’t stop laughing. [YouTube]

via 11th Street

Inspired by Ma6aba’s post on his favorite new show, I decided to share mine which is True Blood. I am half way through season 1 and like all HBO shows I love it. The basic plot behind the show is that Japanese scientists invented synthetic blood and as a result Vampires no longer needed to feed on human blood. Thats why the vampires decided to “come out of the closet” but as expected not everyone believes they should have the same rights like humans and both government and religious leaders are split on this issue. Its not your ordinary story which is why I like the show a lot. I am not aware of any satellite channel that has True Blood but the full season is available on Amazon for just KD11. [Amazon Link]

I passed by Pizza Rustica tonight at the Avenues after reading some positive reviews about it on a couple of blogs. Supposedly they have the best pizza in Kuwait but I don’t think that’s true. Firstly I had a hard time finding a pizza I liked, my usual favorite is ham (veal) with olives and mushrooms but I managed to kinda solve that by ordering a mushroom pizza and asking for olives as an extra topping. Well the pizza turned out to be fairly decent but nothing close to being the best pizza in Kuwait. I didn’t like the taste of the tomato sauce and the cheese was also not that great. Pizza Rustica is owned by Alshaya who also own Pizza Express and Al Forno both of which make better pizzas I think. The service on the other hand was pretty good but that’s not enough to take me back. Want a good pizza while at the Avenues? Then pass by Al Forno instead or even Le Notre.

Looks like the Renault F1 team has been having fun in Dubai. First Ben Sulayem crashes their F1 car at the Dubai Autodrome and then they took it for a spin inside Ski Dubai at the Mall of Emirates. [YouTube]

via

I was checking the blog 4th Ring Road today when I spotted their post on the new Electrozan offer so I decided to pass by them and pick up a BlackBerry Curve for Nat. When I got to the Electrozan showroom I found out the BlackBerry’s were sold out already. The employee told me they will be getting more tomorrow afternoon but I also found out why the Curve’s were being sold for cheap… they are T-Mobile branded. That automatically turned what sounded like a really good deal into a bad deal. Let me explain:

– An unlocked unbranded BlackBerry Curve costs KD135 on Amazon [Link]. With shipping to Kuwait via Aramex the total would amount to KD142. Sorry this was for the QWERTZ keyboard.

– An unlocked unbranded BlackBerry Curve costs KD145 on Amazon [Link]. After tax and shipping to Kuwait via Aramex the total would amount to KD165.

– Now on the other hand a new unlocked T-Mobile branded BlackBerry Curve from eBay costs KD124 [Link]. With shipping to Kuwait via Aramex the total would amount to KD129 which is KD30 cheaper than Electrozan.

So to summarize things, its still a much better deal to order a BlackBerry Curve online since a saving of KD30 is a pretty big chunk.

Update: Just picked up a Curve from Electrozan for Nat. Paypal locked up my account because I logged in and paid for something through my VPN and they assumed someone else got into my account. So now I can’t use eBay for awhile. The BlackBerry is T-Mobile branded and comes with T-Mobile literature. Employee said its officially unlocked so I can do the software updates. Comes with 6 months warranty so it will be interesting to see what exactly that means if something does go wrong from now to 6 months time. They’re out of Bolds at the moment.

Update 2: The Curve’s sold at Electrozan are from T-Mobile Germany which means the keyboard is a QWERTZ and not the regular QWERTY. Simply put, the locations of the letters Z and Y are swapped.

Choowy Goowy will be opening up at the Avenues hopefully this Wednesday. This will be Choowy Goowys first store and they’ve really come a long way since I first reviewed them over three years ago back in January 2006. They will be baking cookies at the Avenues store so you should be able to pick some up as they come out of the oven. The pictures above and below are just sneak peak shots of the store taken with a Nokia E71. They still haven’t removed the wooden paneling that currently surrounds the store so it was pretty hard to get anything wider than these shots.

Update: I just realized that a lot of readers might not be aware of the fact that Choowy Goowy have cookies called Mark&Nat. Back in November 2006 Nat and I were invited to Choowy Goowy to create our own cookies. After some experimenting and having some friends try out our creations, the oreo cookies were voted as being the best and so Choowy Goowy decided to make these cookies and call them Mark&Nat with jar labels matching our blog. You can read about our experience [Here]

“Cockroach” and “Beauty” in the same sentence… yeah i don’t think so. [YouTube]

Thanks Roshan!

A local blogger called Ansam found rotten tomatoes in her Whopper at Burger King. If that wasn’t bad enough the manager there didn’t even apologize for it! Last month it was Hardees with their bug sandwich and now its Burger King with their rotten tomatoes. I guess I am only going to be eating at McDonalds from now on. [Link]

Update: The marketing manager responds, you can read about it [Here]

So as I posted earlier, my Archos 7 arrived today. I watch a lot of movies and tv shows on the plane when I travel and I’ve been using my old iPod to do that. It served me well but the tiny screen and the 4 hour battery life wasn’t cutting it for me. I also didn’t like the fact I had to convert all my videos to a format the iPod would read because it mean I had to plan ahead of time what I was going to take with me so I could spend a couple of days converting them.

I wanted a player which had a long battery life, a large screen and a player that could play Divx and Xvid formatted movies. Thats why I ended up going with the Archos 7. The battery lasts over 8 hours, the screen is a huge 7inch and I could just drag and drop movies onto its 160GB hard drive without converting them.

My first impressions so far are good. The screen is great and much more responsive then I was expecting. It doesn’t get smudged easily because its a matte screen but the back of the device which is shiny is full of smudges. I moved a few tv shows and movies over to the Archos and it played them all except for one which had AC3 sound encoded. To play that I needed to purchase a plug-in which I did. The US site has 3 plug-ins listed for the Archos 7 at $20 each while the global version of the site had the 3 plug-ins bundled together for $40. I decided to get all 3 plug-ins for $40 and I can now play HD movies and movies encoded with AC3 without a problem. I don’t like the idea of paying for plug-ins but I am glad I have the choice to do so instead of no choice at all. I tried watching tv with the built in web tv and although it works I couldn’t find a decent channel to watch except for Sky News. The web browser on the Archos works really well and I was able to load up my blog without any issues. It even displayed the flash ad banners which I have on my site, something which Safari on the iPhone can’t do.

Now the negative stuff. The device is heavier than I expected which isn’t really a problem for me since I will only be using it on the plane. I also had trouble playing one movie, every time I tried it would just crash the Archos. I am thinking its because of the way the movie was encoded but need to experiment more with this. It was a 1.8GB file. Quantum of Solace which I have encoded with AC3 sound and coming in at around 1.4GB played flawlessly.

So far I am really liking the device. I know some of you might have specific things you want to know about the Archos just ask me below and I will try to reply. The Archos 5 and 7 are basically the same device except for the larger screen and longer battery life on the 7.

160GB Archos 7 is for $272. [Amazon Link]
320GB Archos 7 is for $412. [Amazon Link]

A friend of mine got a hold of some cupcakes by Blossom’s Bakery and I think they’re the best cupcakes I’ve had so far. Sadly I understood she no longer takes orders or delivers but you can still check out her blog for a ton of pictures of some really great looking cupcakes. [Link]

I knew there were dog fights in Kuwait but I didn’t think they were being held in public, during the day and at a popular place like the Friday Market. Where were the cops?? This is sick! [Link]