Search: “kuwait”

Chris Mcdougall uploaded a video onto YouTube which he shot himself when he BASE jumped from Hamra Tower this past weekend. This is what he had to say about it:

the raw hand cam and head cam from the first ever base jumps in Kuwait. the exit point was very bad and unstable so i kicked like a bitch and i got a big booga on the camera and on my face on opening. But the one handed landing made up for the other clumsy stuff. More to come in the Middle East….Game on 🙂 P.S. Thanks to Camco Global events for making it happen!

[YouTube]

via His&Hers

According to Arabian Business Kuwait ranked 101st place out of 140 when it came to travel and tourism, the lowest amongst the Gulf countries. No surprise there, not even sure how we didn’t even rank lower since its practically impossible to get a visa to Kuwait. Dubai obviously ranked the highest in the region coming in 28th place out of 140. [Link]

Christian Louboutin will be in Salhiya on Sunday at 3PM for the Christian Louboutin exhibition as well as a shoe-signing. Not sure if the shoe-signing is open to the public but it’s worth taking your shoes and trying.

The Kuwait International Film Retreat have just opened up their registration. If you have a short film that you produced in the past two years you have until April 10 to submit it.

The 2nd Edition of the Kuwait International Film Retreat will be a 3-day mini-film festival bringing together filmmakers and enthusiasts from around Kuwait and the Region to take part in short and feature film screenings, workshops, social gatherings, the red carpet, and an awards ceremony showcasing the best short films in competition.

Last year the Film Retreat earned a lot of respect and praise when they decided to play the movie Tokai at the event even though the Ministry of Information had banned them from doing so.

So if you’re a filmmaker this is a great event to be part of and a great way to get noticed. For more information visit the Kuwait International Film Retreat website [Here]

The P2BK event for 2013 will start tomorrow and last for the next two weeks. This year the set up is a lot more interesting 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 and since the weather is fantastic right now it should be pretty enjoyable checking all the various stalls out.

The event is taking place at the Mishref Fair Ground and will be open from 10AM to 10PM. You can visit the P2BK website for some more information but most of their sections don’t seem to be working right now. [Website]

Arabian Business released their “100 most powerful Arab women 2013” list and 11 Kuwaiti women made the top 100. This year the most powerful Kuwaiti women was Suad Al Humaidi who came in at number 10. Compared to last year, 13 Kuwaiti women made it to the list in 2012 with the most powerful being Sheikha Al Bahar at number 8. Below is the current ranking of all the powerful Kuwaiti women who made the top 100.

10 – Suad Al Humaidi
16 – Sheikha Hessa Bint Saad Abdullah Salem Al Sabah
21 – Sheikha Al Bahar (pictured above)
34 – Maha Al Ghunaim
44 – Donna Sultan
55 – Rola Dashti
58 – Sara Akbar
63 – Maha Hussain
78 – Riham Fouad Al Ghanim
88 – Ghosson Al Khaled
94 – Faten Al Naqeeb

For the full list and article, visit the Arabian Business website [Here]

The Wall Street Journal released a chart showing the price of the Starbucks Grande Latte in various cities around the world. The most expensive location to get one turned out to be Oslo where the price of the Grande Latte was around KD2.800. I was curious to see how Kuwait faired so I passed by Starbucks and checked the price. A Grande Latte in Kuwait is KD1.250 and when I converted that to US Dollars using the NBK website, it turned out to be $4.38. That is the same price as a Grande Latte in Dublin. [Article]

Update: I just found out the price of the Grande Latte is actually KD1.500 which translates to $5.25 and puts the price higher up the list. The Starbucks I visited in the morning was located at the NBK head office and I guess that Starbucks has cheaper prices hence the KD1.250 I was quoted. Below is the updated chart.

Khaled Al-Asfour (aka O-Zone) released the song above for Kuwait’s National Day called “Nothing Like Kuwait”. Not bad considering he’s just 15 years old and recorded this at home. [SoundCloud]

The video above of the impressive shot that took place during the recent ITTF Kuwait Open has been making its rounds around the internet today. What I find more impressive is how an important event like the ITTF Kuwait Open took place in Kuwait and very little knew about it. Based on the news stories on the ITTF website, it looks like it was an important event yet I don’t recall seeing any advertising for it. Not a lot of activities like this take place in Kuwait so I’m sure a lot of people would have been interested to watch it. [YouTube]

Photo by @lolalovepabulum

Earlier this month a documentary about the founders of The Pirate Bay was released online and although I haven’t watched it yet, a reader did and noticed something interesting. Around an hour into the documentary the founders were asked where else they had lawsuits against them and one of the countries they mentioned was Kuwait. Does anyone have any idea who in Kuwait sued The Pirate Bay?

You can check out the scene in the movie by clicking [Here]

Thanks Manafo

[YouTube]

If you don’t know what the Harlem Shake is, click [Here]

via @hishersq8

Update: Here is a funnier one also from Kuwait

[YouTube]

Over the weekend I decided to pass by three museums with a friend of mine. All three museums are located right next to each other so you could cover them all in under two hours. There’s actually a fourth museum right next to the Maritime Museum which you could visit as well, the Modern Art Museum, but they were closed when I passed by.

Maritime Museum
Our first stop was the Maritime Museum which is located opposite Souk Sharq. It’s easy to spot since they have to large wooden ships parked outside with a miniature light house [Google Maps]. The museum is pretty nicely designed on the inside, it’s two floors and pretty modern looking with a ship like structure being the main inspiration to the design. They have a lot of sea related items on display from old tools used to build the ships to fishermen gear. Really worth checking out.

Here is their visiting hours:

Monday to Saturday
8:30AM to 12:30PM and 4:30PM to 8:30PM

Friday
4:30PM to 8:30PM

Dickson House Cultural Centre
Further up the road was the Dickson House Cultural Centre. The Dickson House served as offices and residences for the British Political Agents in the early 1900’s. I didn’t like this place much since there wasn’t much to see inside and the whole interior was refurbished but not to the original state. The outdoor yard in the back on the other hand was nice and the Dickson House caretaker Fayez, whom one of my readers nicknamed the Tour Guide Nazi (in reference to Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi) was a really interesting character. I actually enjoyed sitting on the bench in the yard chatting with him more than the actual tour. [Google Maps]

Here is their visiting hours:

Monday to Saturday
8:30AM to 11:30AM and 4:30PM to 8:30PM

Friday
4:30PM to 8:30PM

Amricani Cultural Centre
The final destination was the Amricani Cultural Centre which is located across the street from the House of Parliament. The Amricani was originally the American Mission Hospital and just recently got renovated and opened to the public. Lectures and exhibitions take place there occasionally but when I passed by there wasn’t anything going on. They do have a 20 minute movie you can watch about the history of the hospital but personally I’d go there just to see their freaky looking display. It’s a small corner showing how the hospital used to look like when it first opened but it really looks like a scene from the movie SAW. Definitely worth checking out. They didn’t have opening hours displayed and I couldn’t find anything on their website but my guess it’s similar to the other two museums above. [Google Maps]

Monday to Saturday
8:30AM to 11:30AM and 4:30PM to 8:30PM

Friday
4:30PM to 8:30PM

All the museums above are free of charge to enter.

Everyone who’s been to the Kuwait Zoo knows how sad and depressing the place is. I’ve written about it a number of times and it’s just something that has bewildered me for a very long time. Why is the zoo the way it is? I always figured the people who worked at the zoo didn’t care about the animals but after meeting a few of the staff members recently I now know that’s not true. Turns out there are two main reasons why the zoo is a disaster, the first is the zoo visitors and the second is they just don’t have enough money to make it better.

The Visitors
Majority of the people who visit the zoo do not respect the animals nor do they respect any of the rules. On one trip to the zoo during the daytime when it was fairly empty I witnessed three different incidents in a space of 15 minutes that summarizes the problem with the people at the zoo. The first incident took place at the elephant enclosure. We noticed a woman with her young kid had climbed over the fence, through the cactuses all the way to the wall of the elephant enclosure and were taking pictures next to the trunk of the elephant that was sticking out. One of the zoo employees who was with me yelled at the women to get away from the elephant because it was dangerous and the woman just coldly took her time making her way back out over the fence as if she had done nothing wrong. A few meters away on the other corner of the enclosure there was a kid next to his mother with a bag of oranges throwing them at the second elephant. Again the zoo employee had to stop the kid from throwing oranges at the elephant while the mother was pretending she wasn’t noticing any of this.

The third incident occurred just a short distance away at the baboon enclosure. As we arrived we noticed a kid was on top of the fence sticking french fries into the baboon cage trying to feed them. His mother and his sister were standing next to him watching and then the baboon stuck his hand out of the cage and the little boy tried to kick it hard but ended up missing and hitting the cage. The zoo employee I was with yelled at the boy to get down and then pulled the kid down but the kid kept climbing back up wanting to feed the baboons. The employee was telling the kid how dangerous it was since the baboons can bite and scratch people when his mother started shouting at her. She told the employee that no one cares about her kids more than her and if this was dangerous she wouldn’t be letting her kids feed the baboons. I was just standing there going WTF?

Visitors are one of the biggest issues of the zoo. I’ve already posted about how some kids try to kill the animals with slingshots and how the trash people throw into the cages end up killing the animals as well. A lot of kids are uneducated and abusive throwing whatever they can at the animals or in the case above trying to kick them. This is why the zoo tries to protect the animals using chicken wire (a fence with very small openings) around the cages, cactus plants, higher fences and security guards. But even those defenses fail all the time, people still manage to shove food into the cages, they pull down the chicken wire fence and put it on top of the cactuses so they can walk on them towards the cages. Even security guards get ignored and the guards are too afraid to confront the visitors anyway.

No Budget
Now this second issue is the bigger of the two. The zoo has limited financial resources. Although Kuwait is a rich country, the zoo and animals aren’t really a priority. Right now there are two major enclosures for example that need to be changed or fixed but the zoo staff haven’t been able to secure the budget for them.

The first problem is the elephant enclosure. Right now there are two elephants and the enclosure is pretty tiny. The larger of the two elephants has started destroying the walls of the enclosure because of frustration. The zoo submitted a proposal to double the size of the enclosure since there is an empty plot right next to the elephant enclosure but the proposal was rejected. Instead a construction company was brought in to install large metal beams around the elephant enclosure as a solution (pictured above).

The second problem that is in dire need of attention is the chimpanzee cage (pictured above). There are four chimps in one of the most depressing cages I’ve ever seen. They have no entertainment whatsoever inside, it’s just a rectangular dark cage with concrete floors and thats it. But, there’s a great spot in the zoo which the staff want to convert to a chimp enclosure. It’s a large space (see below) that can be planted with trees and greenery and chimps can roam free in it. The plan was proposed but rejected due to budgetary reasons. So now the space is gonna be turned into a reptile enclosure filled with a few crocs and turtles which is going to be a complete waste of space.

So although the staff do want to improve the zoo they just don’t have any money do so. It’s very depressing. Even when it comes to fixing enclosures or purchasing new medical equipment it’s all handled in the same low priority “put a bandaid on it” way.

The Solution
The visitors problem is very difficult to fix. One way would be to increase the prices of the tickets (currently it’s 500fils) in hopes that would stop or lessen the amount of visitors that come to the zoo. Educating the parents and the children is too large a task for the zoo to handle and signs and leaflets really have no effect. The most realistic solution to the people problem is to continue and try to protect the animals (I suggested replacing cactus plants with barbed wire) and hiring Kuwaiti security to replace the current expats.

The solution with the budget should be simpler… just increase the budget, but that’s not happening. A more realistic option we discussed is sponsorship by private companies. Companies could sponsor an animal enclosure and the money would be used to build it or improve it. It’s something that’s done in other zoos around the world and in this situation it would be a great way to solve a lot of the problems.

By the way you’re a company and are interested in doing this, email me for more details [Here]

It’s really sad that the zoo doesn’t have any money to improve the situation for the animals. It’s not only the elephants and the chimps that are in trouble but those two are the priorities right now. The baboon cage for example has around 70 baboons inside and is over crowded. The tiger needs more space, the hippos need a new water filter for their pool and one of the giraffes is limping but they don’t have a portable xray machine to check and see why. They even have one animal enclosure nicknamed Guantanamo because it’s that bad.

The problems with the zoo are major and hopefully I was able to bring it some exposure.

Yesterday me and some friends headed to the Kuwait Camel Race Club in Kabd. I had never been to a camel race before and when my friend proposed it I figured it would be something exciting to do on a quiet Saturday afternoon. My friend got in contact with a person at the track so when we got there we had a guide waiting for us.

[YouTube]

The guide got into the car with us and took us past the security gate into the center of the race track where the camel owners drive alongside their camels during the race. The Kuwait Camel Club no longer use human jockeys but instead use robotic ones due to the controversial child jockey problems faced in the past. During the race the camel owners drive down the track alongside their camels controlling their robot jockeys with wireless controllers. The guide made me tune into 93.1mhz on the FM radio because there was a live broadcast of the actual race so we could follow it that way. You could watch the short video above to get a feel of the view from inside the car. During the start of every race all the cars drive to the starting line where the owners make last checks on their camels. The camels don’t start in front of the spectators stand but 3KM away from the finish line. Once the camels are ready they are lined up and the race begins. The cars drive alongside the camels all the way to the finish line and then the cars drive back to the starting line to check on the other set of camels. We did this maybe five or six times until all the races had been finished and then we drove back to the spectator stands.

There was a black tent near the track where the winner was given his prize. Afterwards we were invited to some dates with camel butter and camel milk. The butter was absolutely delicious and even the milk didn’t taste bad at all, kinda like something between buttermilk and laban.

If you’re interested in visiting the tracks to watch a race it’s very easy to find and do. Take the 6th Ring Road and if 360 Mall is on your right keep heading straight past the Jaber Al-Ahmad International Stadium. Keep driving until you pass the new Kuwait University campus on your left (currently just hills and hills of sand surrounded by hoarding) and then after that in a bit you’ll see a sign for the 604 exit. Once you take the exit stop at the traffic light and then take a left and pass under the bridge. Then keep driving straight until you get to a roundabout, drive straight past that roundabout and keep driving until you get to a second roundabout. Once again pass that roundabout and keep driving until you hit the third roundabout. At the third roundabout go left and then head all the way till the end of the road. Once your read the end go right until you get to the end of the road again and you’ll spot the Kuwait Camel Club on your left. The whole ride shouldn’t take you more than 30 minutes. There is no entrance fee and races are held every Saturday from 2:30pm between October and April. Here is the location on [Google Maps]

UPDATE: I posted an updated guide, 2021 edition which you can check here.