The popular CATS Broadway show is coming to Kuwait next month and will be holding shows at the Sheikh Jaber Al Ahmad Cultural Centre from February 9th to February 12th. The musical just premiered in Dubai last night at the newly opened Dubai Opera and looks like Kuwait will be part of their world tour as well.
Tickets are still not on sale but once they’re available it would be interesting to see how they compare to Dubai which are listed as follows:
Diamond seats in the Dubai Opera are right in front of the stage. If you’re interested in watching CATS here in Kuwait, keep checking the cultural centre website for tickets availability [Here]
Note: After Dubai, CATS is heading to Qatar first and then Kuwait.
I found the video above last week by mistake while looking for something else and here is a summary of the incident according to Wikipedia:
On 7 February 1974, Palestinian militants occupied the Japanese embassy in Kuwait City, taking the ambassador and ten others hostage. The militants’ motive was to support the Japanese Red Army members and Palestinian militants who were holding hostages on a Singaporean ferry in what is known as the Laju incident. Ultimately, the hostages were released, and the guerillas allowed to fly to Aden.
What interested me the most was the Japanese embassy building shown in the film above, is it still around? Where is that? It kinda seems like its near the graveyard behind Salhiya but I don’t recall seeing this building before.
A few cool things taking place this weekend. There is the Kuwait Motor Show at 360 Mall starting today, you have AlSouq Market in Murouj tomorrow, you also have the Burgan Marathon Village opening tomorrow with live music all day before the main Spark Marathon on Saturday (Today is the last day to register!). Finally if you’re a Magic: The Gathering fan, there is a prerelease event taking place midnight on Saturday (so late Friday night) till 5AM at Good Game. Check out the full list of this weekends events below:
Yesterday I was trying to find an article I had posted about an event that took place in Kuwait back in 1974. A friend of mine works right next to Souk Al Kabeer in Kuwait City and I thought she would be interested to know that during the construction of the building back in 74, it collapsed during the night while the construction workers were asleep and killed I believe around 40 or 50 people (I think?). I couldn’t find the article but the video above is taken from the AP archive shot that morning showing the aftermath.
I was flipping page by page through my 50s to 90s category on the blog trying to find the article and I couldn’t for some reason. But, I did realize something important, a lot of the videos of old Kuwait I had linked to or a lot of links to photo galleries of old Kuwait on other websites or blogs were now dead and no longer available.
It’s rare and difficult enough finding these treasures and so its pretty sad that many of them are no longer available to view. I was pissed off at myself and disappointed that I didn’t think of downloading or saving backups or hosting the images myself. I always considered it bad etiquette to find images on another blog and then host them all myself, I thought the proper thing to do would be to link back to the blog instead and send people there. Now I regret doing that, I shouldn’t trust other people with the responsibility of archiving history.
I should set up a gofundme where all the money we collect will be used towards purchasing old 1930s to 1970s archive footage of Kuwait
Thinking out loud I tweeted that I should probably set up a GoFundMe account where all the money collected would be used to purchase old footage and photos of Kuwait from the likes of Huntley Film Archives, Periscope Film, AP Archive, various Flickr accounts and the likes and then store them somewhere in the cloud for everyone to access and where it could remain permanently.
But then we’re back in the same situation, where you’re trusting a person (in this case me) to maintain and keep this archive, but what if something happens to me? Say for example one day while driving down the Gulf Road and my Datsun bursts into flames and I die, that means I won’t be able to continue to pay for hosting and maintaining that archive. Actually thats whats going to happen with my blog as well, probably stay up a month or two after I die, and then it would disappear forever along with the 10,000+ posts and over 200,000 of your comments.
This is why I think there needs to be a non profit organization that is responsible for archiving these important items. And I’m not talking about historically important films and artifacts, I’m talking about general random everyday stuff that people wouldn’t think of archiving from old Hardees ads to some guys family photos from the 60s (they’re wonderful). They don’t sound like very important items to archive but I personally think they are. They’re everyday life from a different era.
There actually might be a local organization that is doing this and I’m just not aware of it but I doubt it. KOC have a great in-house archive department which is extremely organized and one I’ve visited and written about [Here], but they are archiving their own content and not other peoples.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is an organization needs to be established and if anyone ever decides to do it then please invite me to be part of it. For now I’m going to spend this weekend skimming through my old 50s to 90s posts and make sure everything I’ve linked to I’ve also mirrored on my blog so if the source is dead the information is still here.
Trip Advisor released a world map highlighting every country’s top tourist attraction and according to the map Avenues is Kuwait’s top tourist attraction. The map uses data from their ‘Thing to Do’ list and Avenues is rated the highest on the Kuwait list. Check out the full map in high resolution [Here]
Back in early November I posted about how Kuwaiti athlete Bashar Alhunaidi along with three other kayakers had started their kayak expedition from Kuwait to Oman to raise awareness of the environmental issues facing the Gulf. It’s been nearly two months since they left Kuwait and they’re now nearing their final destination. Bashar and his team are currently in Abu Dhabi and have around 800km left before reaching Oman. They’ve been pretty busy adding videos and pictures to their instagram account including some funny ones when a gerbil managed to steal some of their food. So check out their instagram account @kayak4kuwait
The Charities Aid Foundation released their yearly World Giving Index and Kuwait scored pretty high in the “Helping a stranger” category coming in 3rd place world wide. Overall though Kuwait barely made it in the top 20 coming in 19th place mostly because of a really low score in the “Volunteering time” category (83rd place). You can check out the full index at the CAF website [Here]
Here’s some cute uplifting news. Earlier this morning, a giraffe was born at the Kuwait Zoo. The mother went into labor at 9:30AM and the giraffe was finally born at 11:30AM. The sex of the giraffe is still unknown as of this post since the zoo keepers can’t touch the giraffe until it nurses.
Over the weekend a brand new Kuwait Airways Boeing 777-300ER plane arrived to Kuwait. This is the second new plane to come into service and there are 8 more coming before the end of the year. The first 777 is supposed to fly the Kuwait – London route but I’m not sure if they’ve started yet. I’m planning on going to London next month and a return ticket on both Kuwait Airways and British Airways are equally priced at just KD133. If the new 777 is being used, I might just fly Kuwait Airways instead since the interior of the new planes are much newer than BA.
This is an updated list of some popular breakfast places in Kuwait. Compared to the previous list I removed some places that had shutdown, added some new spots, updated the timings on some and also highlighted my favorite spots:
