Search: “kuwait”

Even though the MOI website looks like it was designed by a high school student back in 1998, it still gets updated every so often with new features. The latest feature added to the website is the ability for tourists visiting Kuwait to apply for a visa online (eVisa). There is a very short list on the website of nationalities that can use this service, but those nationalities should find this service useful since it will speed up the entry process. Here is the direct link to the eVisa page [Link]

Looks pretty incredible, can’t wait to check it out myself.

Thanks Love_my_kuwait

Not sure when they started but iHop in Jabriya is now open 24 hours a day. Previously they were just open from 7AM to midnight. I’ve updated the Breakfast Places in Kuwait list accordingly.

The Memorial Museum at Al Shaheed Park opened a couple of days ago on the anniversary of the 1990 Kuwait invasion. The exhibit space is really beautiful as you can see in the photos and features interactive displays. The opening hours are from 9AM to 9PM but I’d highly recommend you don’t go during the day in the summer.

The museum is located on the far end of the park, opposite where the parking is located. I wanted to visit the museum during the day time so I could have daylight in my shots and so passed by around 3:30. There was literally no shade from the parking to the museum and by the time I got to the exhibit I felt like I had just crossed the Sahara. If anyone in Al Shaheed Park is reading this, you guys need to have some sort of shuttle service from the parking to the museum or at least plant trees that would shade the walk path.

I love this, a lot. The car is from Kuwait and I’m guessing its probably the same group of guys who do the yearly Jahra to Europe trip. If anyone knows them please put me in touch. I’d love to join them on their next trip and document the whole experience. I’ve got my Datsun, just need to plaster some cheesy stickers on it and it will be ready. [YouTube]

In case you’ve missed the posts from the previous years, here are some links:

No Speak English – Kuwait to Paris 2015
Donuts in the Alps
From Jahra to London

The height of the society-wide insanity occurred when eight speculators, known as “the Cavaliers,” floated a total of $55 billion in postdated checks, seemingly in an attempt to corner the market. The most prolific check writer among the Cavaliers was Jassim al-Mutawa, a Passport Office employee in his early-twenties, who managed to pass off $14 billion all by himself. Sloppy accounting on the part of his brother and partner, Najeeb al-Mutawa, caused Jassim to become a staggering $3.4 billion overdrawn.

A really fascinating article on Souk Al-Manakh in the early 80s. The numbers quoted in the article are insane! I had always been curious about what happened and how it all happened so I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. [Link]

Also, here are some photos of the Souk Al-Manakh building taken in the early 80s via the MIT Libraries.

Thanks faahqueimmanutjawb

The Wataniya Airways twitter account which had been dormant for 3 years suddenly came back to life with the tweet below stating they’re coming back.

عائدون انشاالله…

— الخطوط الوطنية (@WataniyaAirways) August 2, 2016

I also got an email from a Wataniya Airways representative stating that they’re targeting to come back between December and January depending on certain circumstances.

For those of you who weren’t around at the time, Wataniya Airways was a premium local airline that launched back in 2009. Compared to Kuwait Airways at that time, they had newer planes and they flew out of the Sheikh Saad terminal which was (and still is) much nicer than the main terminal. In 2011 they shutdown due to financial reasons.

I’ve got a personal attachment to Wataniya Airways since I had worked with them on their advertising from pre-launch till shutdown, so I’m really interested to see how this will pan out.

Kuwait is to increase the prices of gasoline by as much as 73 percent from September, showing how the oil price slump is affecting the energy-rich Gulf state’s finances.

…

Kuwait’s cabinet said on Monday that the price for the ultra gasoline grade would rise to 165 fils a litre, from 95 currently, the super grade to 105 from 65 and premium grade to 85 from 60, state news agency KUNA reported. [Source]

Ouch, thats a pretty steep hike.

According to a friend of mine, he was driving down the 2nd Ring Road a couple of nights ago and got stopped at a traffic light. There was a cop walking amongst the cars looking for violators or potential violators and because my friend was on the phone, the cop told him to park on the right hand side where some cops were handing out violations. Since my friend had just recently renewed his car registration, the registration paperwork was with his driver. So what was supposed to be a ticket for talking on the phone while driving turned into a car impoundment. So they loaded up his car onto a trailer with a bunch of other cars, all standard stuff so far but here is where things get interesting.

So my friend calls his mum to come pick him up. When his mum arrives the cop saw that his mum had come to pick him up so he called my friend over and told him to go to the trailer and pay the driver KD10. The trailer guy will then drive down the street away from the main road and dismount his car for him. And it wasn’t just my friend, there were 5 other guys who were told to go pay the trailer guy KD10 to have him dismount their cars down the street from the checkpoint.

If you were going to let the guys off the hook why not just dismount the cars right there? Why dismount them down some side street away from the main road? And then on top of that why do they have to pay the driver KD10? The whole thing sounded a bit shady to me so I wanted to post about it and hear some opinions on this.

Image from Arab Times

Last year Alghanim Industries acquired the rights to develop Wendy’s restaurants across the Middle East and it looks like their flagship store in Kuwait is going to be located in Salmiya on Plajat Street. They’ve taken over the site of a defunct food complex and I’m assuming they’re going to be knocking it down and building a large Wendy’s in its place. No idea on when they’re expected to open but I’d guess sometime end of the year or early next year.

via Frankom

“Masane’a Al-Najaah” which translates to Success Factories in English is a locally produced 33 episode reality TV series that follows 27 young successful Kuwaiti entrepreneurs and their projects. The show is in Arabic without any English subtitles so non-Arabic speakers aren’t going to understand anything. But, on the plus side the series is available online to watch for free. Below are the first 3 episodes, for some reason after the 3rd episode they started splitting the videos up into four 15 minute parts which not only makes it difficult to watch but also to difficult to find and link to.

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3

Update: Here is a YouTube playlist with all the episodes [Link]

Thanks Lightbug

A new law regulating all Web-based publications including electronic news services, bulletins, websites of newspapers and televisions and alike came into effect yesterday after its bylaws were published in the official gazette. Information Minister Sheikh Salman Al-Humoud Al-Sabah said the law is for professional online media in a bid to preserve Kuwaiti traditions and counter extremist ideology.

The minister urged all those running online news services to register on the ministry website to obtain the necessary license to operate in the country. Under the legislation, all these services must obtain a license from the government before they can operate. Those in existence have one year to comply with the law. Violations committed by these services will be looked in court under the press and publications law, which stipulates hefty jail terms for several offenses.

During its debate in the Assembly in January this year, the minister insisted the law is aimed at regulating electronic media and it will not apply to personal accounts, like those of bloggers. Under the law, the owner and director of all online services must be Kuwaiti. Violations can be penalized by jail terms of up to 10 years if these services call for the overthrow of the country’s regime. [Source]

Thankfully I’m not included in this since I run a personal blog. If I did fall under this new regulation it would turn out to be such a complicated mess since I’d have to register the blog as online media outlet and I might not get approval for it. And then even if I did get approval I wouldn’t be able to own the blog because I’m not Kuwaiti. The whole thing doesn’t make sense though, you can’t regulate or control the internet.

Yesterday I had a meeting with TAP, (the local electronic payment company) since they wanted to let me know of some new things they’ll be introducing in a couple a months time. I can’t disclose any of it for now but while meeting with them I did manage to get some details on their current services. To be truthful, I wasn’t a fan of TAP before my meeting and that’s mostly because of the ridiculous no desktop browser rule they had in place. Basically on more than one occasion when I wanted to pay for an item using their service, the link the seller provided wouldn’t work from my computer. Turned out their service would only work when using a mobile phone browser and I thought that was the dumbest thing ever. There was no technical reason for it, they just decided not to allow people on desktops from using their service. Not very practical especially when I would link to workshops on my event page that required TAP payments. Thankfully, this annoyance will be solved with their upcoming updates.

With that rant out of the way, what I wanted to write about in this post is how their payment system is actually really great for home and small businesses in Kuwait. When I was starting a company and wanted to setup a payment system for an online store, the fees involved were ridiculous. Firstly you needed to be an officially registered business which means home businesses couldn’t setup an online payment system. Secondly the cost involved was just too high, depending on the bank you would pay a setup fee of around KD750 (KD1,000 in some cases), then a monthly fee ranging from KD25 to KD50 depending on the bank and then on top of that a charge per transaction, 1% for debit cards and 3% for credit cards. So if you’re just starting up those fees could be pretty brutal.

TAP on the other hand offer two services for home and small businesses and in both services you do not have to be an officially registered business.

GoCollect
The first service is called GoCollect. Say you have an instagram account and you sell cupcakes out of your home, when someone places an order with you through whatsapp, you would provide them with a link that will send them to the TAP website where they could pay you either with a debit card or credit card. There is no setup fee for this service and you can sign up to it from the TAP website. You could be up and running in less than 24 hours. TAP make their money with transaction fees, they charge 200fils 2.5% per debit card transaction and 3% for credit card transactions. TAP gets your customers money and then deposits it into your account. You don’t have to be dealing with a certain bank either, they work with all local banks.

GoSell
The second service they offer is called GoSell. This is for small businesses that have an online store. Say you’re selling tshirts and you created an online shop using one of the online services like Shopify, Magento, WordPress or whatever, TAP would provide you with a plugin (or API for pros) that would allow you to integrate their payment system with your ecommerce website. They charge around KD300 to set this up for you, maybe a bit less, maybe a bit more depending on the size of your business and then like with GoCollect, they charge 200fils 2.5% per debit card transaction and 3% for credit cards. No monthly fees.

If you’re a home or small business or thinking of starting a business then this is currently the easiest way to setup a payment system. If you want to find out more you can visit their website for more details [Here]

Update: I was informed by TAP to replace the 200fils debit card transaction fee in my post with 2.5% since they don’t have a fix rate. Depending on the size of your business and your negotiation ability the debit card transaction fee could be 200fils, could be 1%, could be 2.5% etc.. it varies

Awhile back I was talking to my friends dad who’s been in Kuwait working on the local infrastructure since the 60s and he told me that when the First Ring Road was originally conceived it was meant to be a loop. I don’t remember the exact conversation but they ran into issues (I think a politician didn’t want a bridge overlooking his property or something along those lines) and the project never got completed. Now the project is back on track and those of you who work in the city have probably noticed a lot of road closures. Last week the road from Dasman roundabout to the First Ring Road was shutdown and dug up and yesterday the Dasman roundabout itself was dissected (pictured below) so construction can start there as well.

I’m going to try and get official pictures of the project but once construction is completed it should look something similar to my drawing on top. I’m guessing as well that once the project is completed you should be able to loop the First Ring Road without stopping at any traffic light so I’m curious to see how they’re planning to connect the current end of the First Ring Road which ends at Souk Mubarakia to the new extension which starts near the Grand Mosque and Kuwait Stock Exchange. I checked the Projects Explorer on the Ministry of Public Works website and according to the information I found there, once this project is completed there will be a total of 5 bridges connecting the current end of the First Ring Road to the start of the First Ring Road. I couldn’t find a completion date nor could I find renderings of how the project will look like also once completed but I’m trying to get my hands on them.

If you have any renderings or more information please share it.

Early this month Cinescape launched 4DX theaters that include high-tech motion seats and special effects including wind, fog, lightning, bubbles, water, rain and scents to go along with the movie. Yesterday while booking tickets at Grand Cinemas for Star Trek Beyond (not worth watching btw) I found out Grand Cinemas launched MX-4D which is the direct competitor for 4DX. Based on the specs I’ve read online, MX-4D provides even more special effects with their seats featuring a rumbler, water blast, seat popper, back poker, leg ticklers, air blast, wind, neck tickler, snow, scent, strobe, fog, rain and bubbles. The cost of the ticket is similar to Cinescape at KD8 per person. I still haven’t tried 4D yet but I’ve been told it’s worth experience so will be doing so soon.