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As I’ve mentioned before I get a lot of strange emails, at least one a day and sometimes when they are really strange I decide to share them with you. This is one I just received now, I have no clue what it says! By the way, I received it exactly the way its written below.. with the spaces and all…

ｙｅｓｔｅｒｄａｙ　ｉ　ｂｏｕｇｈｔｆｒｏｚｅｎ　ｔｗｏ　ｍｉｎｃｅ，ｂｕｔ　ｔｈｅ　ｐｒｉｃｅ　ｉｓ　ｖｅｒｙ　ｄｉｆｆｅｒｅｎｔ．ｂｕｔ　ｔｒｕｔｈｆｕｌｌｙ　ｏｎｅ　ｐｉｃｅｓ０．５４５ｆｉｌｓ，ｉｍ　ｂｕｙ１．０２０ｆｉｌｓ　ａｎｄ　１．０４０ｆｉｌｓ．ｉｍ　ｓｔａｙ　ｉｎ　ｆｉｎｔａｓ，ｓｈｏｐｓ　ｕｎｔｉｌ　ｖｅｒｙ　ｄｉｓｔａｎｔ．ｗｈａｔ　ｉｓ　ｔｈｅ　ｄｉｆｆｅｒｅｎｃｅ　ｍｉｎｕｔｅｓ　ｙｏｕ？

Update: For those of you just seeing shapes instead of copy, here is what it says:

Yesterday I bought frozen two mince. but the price is very different. but truthfully one pieces0. 545fils. im buy1. 020fils and 1. 040fils. im stay in fintas. shops until very distant. what is the difference minutes?

Yes I like shawermas and it seems a lot of people know that because before I left to London around a million people recommended I should try the shawermas at Ranoush. Ranoush Juice is part of the Maroush group of restaurants which are extremely popular in London and the place was located near my hotel on Edgware Road so I decided to go ahead and try it.

Good shawerma in London? I found that hard to believe and I would never have believed it had I not tried it for myself. I’ve been reviewing shawermas for a while now and its always difficult to describe the taste of a shawerma, its not easy to explain why one tastes better than the other or why it tastes worse. It’s mostly because its not one single thing alone that makes a difference, its a balance of a variety of things and this was the case with the shawermas at Ranoush. There wasn’t anything particular I could single out about their shawerma which made it special but it was. Maybe it was because I hadn’t had a shawerma for a week, I don’t know but it just felt really good having it. It felt comfortable and so perfectly balanced. The garlic wasn’t too strong but wasn’t too weak, the chicken was great and the cleanliness of the place was top notch.

Price sadly was out of this world for a shawerma, 3.25 Pounds which is around KD1.900! It completely blew away the previous record of 750 fils for the Villa Fayrouz Express shawerma but luckily for Ranoush it’s in London and KD1.900 for a shawerma is a great deal in a city where KD5 burgers are practically the norm. This is why for the final score it gets a 4.5 out of 5.

While in London I kept spotting this really cool retro looking car. At first I thought it was a classic British car but when I found a parked one and was able to get closer it turned out to be a Nissan Figaro. When I got back to the hotel room I did a quick google search and it turned out the Figaro’s were produced in the early 90’s and have a small cult following. I am not usually a fan of retro looking cars but I can’t help but not love this one, it just looks really funky. I found a place online that sells excellent condition versions for prices ranging from 3000 to 4000 Kuwaiti Dinars. [Link]

I got the latest version of OS X with me from London and I installed it today and its pretty cool. No major upgrades but instead lots of tiny ones here and there. My biggest concern was the dock, I was worried I wasn’t going to like the redesigned version but not I don’t think I can go back to the old one. Overall Leopard is just much prettier. I am now going to just format my Macbook and reinstall it again fresh. I don’t have a particular reason for doing it other then its a good way for clearing up space.

This is really messed up. One of my hard drives, a 500GB Western Digital has just died on me. The drive was full with only around 8GB of free space. It had a ton of movies, tv shows and my iTunes library. Now its fucking dead, just like that out of the blue.

Now what? Thats what I have been asking myself for the past few minutes. Do I get another hard drive and go through the painstaking task of re-downloading all the movies and shows? Where do I begin? I don’t even know what movies and shows I even had on this drive. I’ve been asking myself for a long time now why I am building a large database of shows and movies and why I don’t delete them when I am done with them. I never have a proper answer. What about the other shows and movies I have on other drives, do I just delete them as well and say fuck it to all this?

I didn’t back up my data because it wasn’t important data. The only thing I do have backed up are my MP3s but thats because they are all legally ripped from my CD’s or purchased digitally online. I backed them up because I did not want to go through the painstaking task of ripping my CDs all over again one by one. My movies and TV shows are illegally downloaded and they are just too huge to back up anyway coming in at over 1.5TB. I don’t know what I will do, its a shock. I guess I will just get another drive and just continue from where I stopped.

We left Paris today and got back to London but not without going on one hell of a ride.

We got to the Eurostar train station in Paris around 5PM which was around an hour before our train was set to leave. When we got to the automatic check in the machine rejected our tickets. I couldn’t understand why until an employee there arrived to help us and explained to us the problem. Our train had left over an hour earlier!

I am not one to make a lot of mistakes, I am usually the extremely reliable guy who plays it really safe and always tries to arrive earlier than the recommended time. Somehow, for some fucked up reason, I read our London arrival time as our Paris departure time. I can’t understand how that happened, looking at my non refundable non exchangeable ticket now I can’t imagine how I mixed up the departure and arrival times. Its right up on my list of dumbest things I have done in my life. We had missed our train out of Paris and that was just the beginning of our adventure.

There was another train leaving to London in around 2 hours so we headed to the really long cue queue to buy tickets and waited. While in line I tried calling NBK on 801801 to try and move money onto my credit card. I didn’t know how much I had left on the card and I didn’t know how much the tickets would cost so I figured I would play it safe and move some more money onto my visa. I spent 15 minutes trying to call Kuwait without any luck when suddenly I got through and got a hold of the NBK operator and explained to her that I wanted to move money onto my card. After 10 minutes of trying the NBK operator told me there was a problem with the NBK automated system and I should call back in 15 minutes.

We got up to the ticket counter and we asked for 2 one way tickets out of Paris. The employee told us we could get on the next train, price was 236 Euros per person which amounted to a total of 472 for the two of us. That was more than DOUBLE what I had paid for 3 weeks ago for our two way tickets! We didn’t have any other option so we asked for the tickets but when we tried paying for them both my credit card and Nat’s got rejected. Our cards were maxed out, it just wasn’t our luck.

Now you are probably thinking why didn’t I just withdraw money from an ATM machine and pay for the tickets with cash? Well the problem is when I travel I don’t keep a lot of money in my ATM card account so that just in case I get mugged at an ATM machine I can only withdraw a certain amount of money (I watch a lot of movies). It’s never been a problem before because I always use my credit card for my purchases and if I needed more money than whats available on my ATM card I just transfer more onto it.

So here was the situation, my Macbook had no battery and I didn’t have the charger so I couldn’t connect to a wifi network at the train station. There was also no Internet cafe at the station but even if there was I didn’t want to access my bank account from a public computer. I couldn’t get a hold of NBK, the answering machine never came on it just kept ringing and no one was picking up. Since I couldn’t connect to my NBK account I couldn’t use my credit card and I couldn’t withdraw any money so I was pretty much fucked.

I decided to call my sister and have her log into my NBK account and transfer money, problem was she wasn’t at home and the line kept breaking up. I then started calling my friends one by one to see if they were near an Internet connection including Bader, Marzouq and Khalid but no one was near a computer. It was just freaking frustrating. I had the money to buy the fucking tickets to get the hell out of Paris but I just couldn’t get that money onto my ATM or credit card! Time was running out by now and I needed to buy the tickets.

We decided to leave the station and head out around town looking for a place to get Internet access. After around 30 minutes of exploring and asking people we finally found an Internet cafe. I asked the guy if I could connect with my macbook but he told me it wouldn’t be possible. I looked at his computers, they had Windows XP on it… I had no clue if there were any trojans or softwares that would read and store my bank account info and passwords on the machines but I didn’t have an option, I was desperate and I just needed Internet. In literally 2 minutes I had logged into my bank account, transferred money onto my ATM and credit card and was out of the cafe. Thats all I needed, 2 fucking minutes of Internet to change the direction of my life.

We ran back to the train station with 45 minutes to spare but now we were back in the cue queue to buy tickets. 30 minutes later we purchased the tickets. The employee told us something about how our seats would be pull down seats but we didn’t care we just wanted to get on the train. We checked in, passed through passport and security check which luckily was empty and ran towards our train. If we had just been 1 minute late we would have missed the train again.

When we finally got on the train and the doors shut and we started moving, it was just the most amazing feeling of relief. Our fold down seats were these tiny seats located between the carriage cars (pictures above). They weren’t really that bad, it was kinda cozy sitting in between the carriage cars alone.

I can’t believe how an average day turned into such a mess. First thing I did when I got to my hotel room here in London was log on to the internet and change my NBK online banking password. Also when I get back to Kuwait I am going to take out another credit card and keep it aside just in case of emergencies like today. Finally Nat is going to be taking care of our traveling from now on, I am losing it!

We were at the supermarket picking up some munchies when on our way to the cashier we noticed a bunch of self checkout counters. It was hard to grasp the concept at first, I check out my stuff? Who will check and see if I was honest and didn’t skip anything? I still don’t know how they make sure people don’t cheat (probably monitor them with CCTV’s) but the idea of having customers check themselves out is unreal.

Its a pretty easy process, you take your items one by one, scan them on the machine and place them in the bag. Then you have a number of ways to pay, I chose credit card and just placed my card in the machine and that was it. Its the coolest thing ever.

Today is the final race for Formula 1 with the rookie favorite McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton (107 points) and just mere points separate him from his own team mate Fernando Alonso (103) and Ferrari’s Kimi Räikkönen (100).

Also include the drama that has been happening between Alonso and Hamilton then the spy scandal with Ferrari and McLaren it just extra spicing for what looks like will be an great race.

You can catch it tonight on Jazeera Sports at 7pm local time.

Personally I am cheering for Hamiliton, I like what he has done for the sport and is a new face and really got me into the sport this year.

Who do you think will win?

Did you know that you can purchase the waffle cones from Baskin Robbins without ordering ice cream? The regular sized waffle costs 100 fils while the large waffle cone costs 150 fils.

Quick Waffle Desert

Ingredients:
1 Large waffle cone
2 Bananas
Jar of Nutella

Instructions:
Chop up the bananas and place them in the cone.
Pour Nutella over them.
Eat.

So the new Max OS is available to pre-order from Amazon.com for $109. I placed my order but I wish they had it available as a download on the first day of release. Kinda like the Radiohead album. Actually, like the Radiohead album, it would also be cool if we could decide on the price ourselves, I would have paid $50 instead of $109. [Amazon Link]

I passed by McDonald’s today for a quick bite to eat and noticed they had spring rolls on the menu. I hadn’t had McDonald’s since before ramadan so I don’t know how long they’ve been serving them but I decided to give it a shot.

It’s very rare for a fast food place like McDonald’s, KFC, Hardees or Burger King to introduce an appetizer and have it succeed. The only successful appetizer I can think of is the popcorn chicken at KFC. With that in mind and with the fact that chinese food is the last thing I would think of finding at McDonald’s, I proceeded to order my spring rolls with caution.

I know this might sound crazy, I know that my taste buds can be screwy sometimes and I know the Chinese are going to hate me for saying this but… the spring rolls at McDonald’s weren’t bad at all. In fact they were pretty good. I’ve tried nearly everything that McDonald’s in Kuwait ever introduced to their menu and this is why I know to always expect the unexpected with them. When they introduced their Mushroom and Swiss burger I expected it to be the best burger they’ve ever created and it turned out to be the worst burger ever.

The spring rolls comes with a sweet chili sauce which is actually a big part of the reason the spring rolls are good. The price is also good, 550fils for 6 pieces. In the end, these spring rolls are not the best spring rolls in the world. They are not even close to being the best spring rolls in Kuwait but compared to what other fast food places are offering like the crappy Hot Rods at KFC or the overpriced cheese sticks at Burger King, these spring rolls are the best appetizers being offered at the moment and best value for money. I give them a 3.5 out of 5.

A few months back I noticed a new sports store was opening up in place of where Boushari was located in Salmiya. I was pretty excited because I thought it was a new franchise opening but then I found out it was just Sport Corner and I lost interest. Sports Corner was already open further down the street near Thuraya Complex and I didn’t like the place so I wasn’t expecting this new one to be better. I even got invited to the launch of the new store but I wasn’t interested.

Tonight though I decided to go in and it was pretty impressive. The store is 4 floors and although I don’t think the floor space is as big as GoSport, its still pretty packed with stuff especially in the basement. The ground floor is dedicated to Adidas, the second floor to Reebok, the third floor is Champions and the basement is packed with weight lifting, exercise equipment, bikes, punching bags, rackets and just a ton of stuff. The place is worth a visit if anything just so you know whats available in Kuwait in terms of sporting gear. GoSport still caters to a wider range of sports while I would say Sports Corner has a larger variety of weight lifting and exercise equipment.

The Kuwait Flour Mills started producing a new type of burger bun. Or at least I think its new since I never spotted it before and its still not listed on their website. The new bun is similar to the buns used at places like Burger Boutique and Johnny Rockets and doesn’t come with sesame seeds on the top. By the way you have to check out the Kuwait Flour Mills website, its really strange. They have an online shop which doesn’t seem to work, they have a section called “Attractive Corner” and they have a weird flash intro. On the bright side, its cool they have a site. [Link]

With the new redesign of the site I’ve also added three new minor features.

Print option
Say for one reason or another you want to print a post, there is now a little print icon at the end of every post (after you click on the post) which will take you to a printer friendly version of the article. You then have the option to print the post either with or without the user comments.

Email option
Again for one reason or another you want to share a post with someone you can now email it to them. There is a little email icon next to the print icon at the end of every plost (again after you click on the post).

Page navigation
At the bottom of the main page there is now a more advanced page navigation system. Before it was just “Previous” and “Next” now its a bit more than that. My favorite part is the “Last” button which will take you to my first posts on this blog.

Pepsi wins!

INDIANA, Pa. (AP) — The long-standing rivalry between Coke and Pepsi took a physical turn Friday when a Pepsi deliveryman allegedly punched his Coke counterpart in the face at a western Pennsylvania Wal-Mart, state police said.

The two deliverymen were “apparently bickering back and forth” while unloading their wares at the Indiana County store, police said. When the Coke deliveryman left the store, his counterpart allegedly punched him in the face three times, breaking his nose and giving him a black eye, police said.

No charges have been filed, but police characterized the incident as a misdemeanor simple assault. [Source]