Categories
Design Fashion

kthnxbye

Kuwaiti graphic designer Fahad AlHunaif who’s based in New York struck gold a few days ago when one of his cap designs was worn by the British fashion model Cara Delevingne. She was backstage at the Jeremy Scott Runway Show when fashion photographer Terry Richardson snapped some pictures of her wearing the cap. Sadly I have no idea where you can get one from. You can check out the pictures taken by Terry Richardson [Here]

If you want to check out some of Fahad’s work you can do so on his tumblr [Here] or you can follow him on [Instagram]




Categories
Animals Kuwait

Hedgehog on the loose in Abdaliya

Big news for wildlife in Kuwait when K’S PATH, together with KOC, released the first mammal into the recently completed Abdaliya nature preserve. The animal in question, a long-eared hedgehog, was found in a garden near the city. Long-eared hedgehogs are solitary mammals that spend much of their lives alone, except during breeding season which occurs in March, just after hibernation. This year, we are planning to relocate many more hedgehogs and fox into the preserve, taking them from high-risk areas or from areas where they are abundant.

Our goal is to create an ecosystem thriving with native wildlife. In the coming months, we will begin efforts to release more hedgehogs as well as Ruppell’s Fox in to the preserve and will be installing nesting boxes and perches for native birds.

You can look forward to more updates on this project soon. Want to make a difference? Keep wildlife wild. Don’t hunt. All forms of hunting are illegal by Kuwait law. Illegal hunting (poaching) has caused the local extinction of many species, and we are constantly finding dead birds around Kuwait. Finally, keep up with or even contribute to our work by visiting K’S PATH on [Facebook]

Post by John Peaveler
Managing Director
Kuwait Society for the Protection of Animals and Their Habitat (K’S PATH)




Categories
Cars & Bikes Events

Red Bull X-Fighters Jams

Yesterday Red Bull held their X-Fighters Jams event at the Kuwait Towers and a reader took some pictures of the event which you can check out [Here]

Looked pretty cool.

Thanks Mufaddal




Categories
Information News

Press Freedom Index 2013

Kuwait is still leading in the Arab world when it comes to freedom of the press. In this years Press Freedom Inde, Kuwait moved up one point from #78 to 77 while Lebanon who was second last year at #93 dropped down to 101. Check out the full list and more information [Here]




Categories
Events

Events this weekend

Kuwait Riders Bike Show – Wednesday to Friday
Red Bull X-Fighters Jams – Friday
Spring Fair – Saturday




Categories
Interesting

Qumooth Love Singles by dh-c

My good friends at dh-c created a very cool gift set for Valentines day. The set includes a framed drawing of my favorite Kuwaiti character “Qumooth” and a CD that contains a mystery love song (supposedly very cheesy). They’ve only created 5 frames and each comes with a cactus and a jar of salted caramel. If you’re interested in purchasing one they’re available on The Yard’s website [Here]




Categories
Food & Drinks Reviews

Review: Kout Way Restaurant

Kout Way is a small Kuwaiti fast food restaurant that opened up last summer in Salmiya. I love murabyan (rice with shrimps) but wasn’t really sure what to expect with a “fast food” version of the dish. Turns out it’s pretty much the same.

I really like how Kout Way looks like on the inside. It has a modern and trendy interior with hints of tradition here and there. Like all fast food restaurants it’s self service, you order at the counter and then go sit down and wait for your meal. I of course ordered the murabyan, I had two sizes to choose from regular or small, I ended up going with the regular size. I also ordered cheese sambousa and cucumber yogurt for my sides.

Regular size it was not that’s for sure. The portion was pretty huge and they weren’t stingy with the quantity of shrimps either. At first I thought the shrimps were just on top of the rice but the more I kept digging into the rice the more shrimps I found. It also tasted pretty good specially considering this was a fast food version of the dish. The cheese sambousa on the other hand weren’t that great while the cucumber yogurt, well it’s just cucumber and yogurt so you can’t go wrong with that.

Overall I really like the place and at KD3 for the regular sized murabyan or KD2 for the small it’s pretty decently priced. The restaurant is located on Baghdad Street right next to Dodo [Google Maps]. They also deliver and their number is 94006767.




Categories
Animals Complaints

The Ahmadi Park Zoo

I didn’t know the Ahmadi Park had a zoo yet alone one that looks this depressing. Based on the pictures a reader sent me this zoo looks even worse than the Kuwait Zoo.

Thanks Meshal




Categories
Cars & Bikes

Porsche World Roadshow

Last week I got invited to Dubai to take part in the Porsche World Roadshow that was taking place there. I wasn’t sure what to expect I was just hoping I would be able to drive some cars really fast around the track and that’s exactly what happened.

Once we arrived to the Dubai Autodrome race track we were greeted by nearly 30 Porsches parked nicely outside the pits. The cars looked beautiful and I couldn’t wait to get in one. After a short briefing by the instructors we were divided into four groups and taken to our cars.

We had four different exercises we took part in, Handling 1, Handling 2, Off-road and Slalom. Handling 1 involved taking the brand new 911’s and Boxsters out onto the track where we drove them as fast as we could. Handling 2 involved taking out the Panemaras around the track. Off-road was obviously where we took the Cayenne’s and finally the slalom was a small competition involving the new Boxster.

I hadn’t driven any Porsche before so I really had a lot of fun driving them around the track through out the day. My favorite car had to be the Porsche 911 4S but the Boxster S was also surprisingly fast and nimble. With the amount of Porsches on the streets in Kuwait I keep forgetting that they’re not really affordable even though everyone seems to have one. Now like everybody else, I also want one.




Categories
Sports

Strange way of taking a free kick

The Kuwaiti futsal team scored a pretty strange free kick goal against the Jordanian team during their game over the weekend. Check it out in the video above. [YouTube]

Thanks Allen




Categories
Food & Drinks Personal Reviews

Brunch at The Cheesecake Factory

I passed by The Cheesecake Factory at The Avenues this morning for breakfast. Every Saturday morning from 10AM to 2PM they have a special brunch menu and I was curious to try their pancakes since I had heard they were really good. I ended up ordering two dishes for myself, the Monte Cristo Sandwich and the Buttermilk Pancakes. What is the Monte Cristo? This is the description from their website:

Monte Cristo Sandwich
Crunchy French Toast Stuffed with Bacon, Grilled Ham, Scrambled Eggs and Melted Swiss Cheese Dusted with Powdered Sugar and Served with Strawberry Preserves.

The Monte Cristo was ridiculously good, probably my favorite breakfast dish right now. Their pancakes now are also easily my favorite pancakes in Kuwait. They were really fluffy and light and I had to stop myself from finishing them. Which brings me to a very important problem with this breakfast.

THE CALORIES!

If you’re a calorie counter you’re in for a treat. The Monte Cristo Sandwich is a whopping 1,618 calories while the Buttermilk Pancakes are 1,310 calories. Try to figure out a way to burn those.

Service was so so. Took me a few tries to explain to the waiter I wanted pancakes and even when I pointed at it in the menu he thought I was pointing at another dish. I also told him to bring all the food together but my Monte Cristo came first. Not major issues but still worth noting. The pancakes cost KD3 while the Monte Cristo I think was KD4.250. I highly recommend both dishes and it’s too bad they only serve them on Saturdays. Oh and of course I wish they were both just 500 calories combined instead of being nearly 3,000…




Categories
Music

Mubarak Al Rashed


[YouTube]

I’ve featured a lot of talented Kuwaiti musicians on the blog from the likes of Faisal Al-Salem who’s a lead singer for a very popular Japanese thrash metal band and Naser Al-Marzouq, the young and blind Kuwaiti piano player. Mubarak Al Rashed is another Kuwait musician who I think is also really talented.

I found out about Mubarak a few days ago when a reader emailed me telling me about him. Mubarak is a cop by day and an extremely talented Hindi singer by night. It’s a pretty strange combination but if you watch him sing in the video above you’ll see how great is. There are even more videos of him singing [Here]

I also found this old cached Kuwait Times article which has a bit more information on Mubarak and how he got into Hindi music. You can check that article [Here]

Thanks Francis




Categories
Activities Interesting Kuwait

House of Mirrors


Lidia al-Qattan explaining the Big Bang Room

I’ve being thinking about this post for the past few days trying to figure out what I was going to write exactly. The place turned out to be such a cool and surreal experience that I just couldn’t figure out where to start or how to say what I wanted to say. In the end I decided that I’ll be brief and not go into details so that you go there with no expectations other than having a good time.


Me posing outside the house with @kuzmoz

Last week a friend asked me if I wanted to join them on a tour of the House of Mirrors and since I had never been I decided to join them. The House of Mirrors belongs to Lidia al-Qattan, the widow of Khalifa al-Qattan, a renowned Kuwaiti artist. She started decorating one small wall with mirrors and through time more and more walls were decorated until the whole house inside and out was covered with mirrors.


The reception area with munchies

As I said, I’m not going to go into details because I don’t want to ruin the experience for you but simply put Lidia is such an amazing person. We were expecting the tour of the house to take around 30 minutes but it took us 3 hours and the 3 hours literally flew by. She was such an incredible host full of stories and the whole experience was seriously pretty trippy.

If you’ve never been to the House of Mirrors you should and when you do make sure you go with a bunch of friends since its an experience that should be shared. The cost of the tour is KD2 per person on weekdays and KD3 on weekends. The location of the house Street 94 Qadisiya, House 17 Block 9. You need to call ahead and make an appointed on this number 22518522.




Categories
Animals

A different take on the zoo

With all the problems with the Kuwait Zoo we sometimes forget it still can be a nice place to visit. A friend of mine passed by last week and she wrote about it in a much more positive way than I could ever do.

Did you know that the entrance fee is [500 filss] ONLY?! And now that the weather is still breezy & the sun isn’t eating our heads, half a KD will grant you scenery, active animals, great open space, clear skies, and best of all- an adventure to remember.

Her pictures are also really great so check out her post [Here]




Categories
Information Internet

Free Internet with Elmnet

Elmnet in collaboration with Qualitynet are currently giving away 2Mbps internet for free at InfoConnect. Sounds too good to be true? Well it kinda is. Here are some things you need to know:

Pros
– It’s for everyone, expats and Kuwaitis
– It’s free and it’s 2Mbps

Cons
– You can only use their software to browse the internet
– You can only browse the internet and do nothing else internet related (no torrents, no online gaming etc.)
– You will have three ad banners on the screen the whole time framing the browser, one on the left, one on the right and one below
– You can only use it on a computer. You can’t use it on your smart phone or any other device like your gaming system or tablet

The salesman wasn’t sure if it would work with Macs or Linux operating systems

works on Macs but not Linux

Update: According to a spokesperson from Elmnet the connection isn’t limited to just browsing. You can use the connection for other internet activities like downloading torrents and streaming music from apps like Spotify etc.