Search: “kuwait”

After stepping on Geo last night I was hoping by today morning he would be ok, well, he wasn’t. He was still limping in the morning so me and Nat decided to take him to the International Veterinary Hospital. We arrived there at 8:30AM to a beautiful sight of around a dozen dogs with a dozen handlers all lined up outside the place doing some training. We later found out these dogs were mostly used for narcotic and bomb detection, really cool. We continued going in and asked to see the Vet, after waiting for a while outside on the green grass we were called in. Our usual vet only comes in during the afternoon so today we had another Italian vet except this time it was a woman. She did some physical tests on Geo and recommended we take some Xrays just to be safe. Good thing we did because it turned out he fractured bones. Now geo has something like a cast around his leg and he is going to have to be in it for up to 3 weeks depending on how fast he will get healed. The vet was very nice and although Geo looks like a dork now with his one green leg I am really glad he is going to be ok. I am going to hopefully get 10 days off work so I could be with him at home. I feel really guilty for what I did and even though he loves to runaround and play its not going to be possible until his leg heals. The vet told us he is lucky he is still a puppy because they heal a lot quicker. She gave us some calcium pills and told us to give him a lot of cheese to help speed up the healing process. The whole thing cost us only KD34 which is pretty decent and now Geo is sleeping in the living room while I am watching the Discovery Channel. I am sorry Geo!!

As I mentioned yesterday I was going to send an email to Pizza Hut International about the cockroach I found walking on the table. Well they replied to my email and here is what they had to say:

Dear Mr . Mark,

Thank you for taking the time to contact our International Customer Services Hotline regarding your feedback.

As per the standard of Pizza Hut, we aim to provide and serve the highest quality product at all times. Your feedback and comments are very important to enable us further improve our service.

We do apologize for the inconvenience this situation may have caused you. By copy of this note, I am passing your comments to Mr. Louay Ghandour from Al Homaizi Foodstuff Co., our Pizza Hut Franchise partner in Kuwait and I am confident that Pizza Hut representative will contact you to address the points you raised.

Please do not hesitate to contact us again in the future.

Best regards,
Lanie Kadwani

A good reply but lets see how the local management will react.

I was sitting having my salad at Pizza Hut in Muthana Complex (Kuwait City) with Nat when I look to my left and see a huge fucking cockroach on the table! I quickly got up surprising Nat who hadn’t yet noticed the intruder yet. I was like look there is a fucking cockroach on the table which quickly made her get up in disgust and shock. So I call the head waitress over and I told her there was a huge cockroach on the table. She calmly asks us if we would like to change to another table. I asked her if there were gonna be any cockroaches there and she laughed and said no. I didn’t find any of this funny. We sat down at the new table but neither Nat nor I felt like finishing our salads so I got up to the counter to pay the bill.

While I was standing there waiting for the cashier to hand me back my change I hear Nat calling a waiter and then telling him that the cockroach is back on our old table, he quickly goes and kills it. I tell the cashier I want to talk to the manger and he tells me OK but then starts tidying up around the register and putting away menus and stuff. So I tell the cashier I wanted to see the manager NOW, he was like why is there a problem? I was like fuck yes now get me the manager. The manager comes out of the kitchen and asks me what the problem was. I told him the problem was there was a huge fucking cockroach on the table while we were eating. I told him I found that disgusting and I would never come back to the place again. The manager who looked like he was confused and didn’t know what to do told me the reason for the cockroach was that they had sprayed the night before. I told him I didn’t fucking care and thats not an excuse since there was a fucking cockroach on my table! Seeing as I wasn’t even going to be able to convince the manager that the cockroach on the table was a problem I picked up my stuff and left.

I am never going back to another Pizza Hut again. Other then the cockroach on the table I found the staff very unprofessional and I found the manager to be incompetent and an idiot. He barely even apologize about the cockroach nor did he offer any kind of compensation! I am now going to make sure the owners, Al Homaizi Food Group know about this incident and I will also send an email to Pizza Hut international so they know what kind of managers work for them. This was really fucking disgusting.

Wow, all the movies on this list are over 5 hours with the longest one being 27 hours long! To think I was complaining about how King Kong was too long.. [Link]

I just found this website called Q8 Beasts and according to the description on the website its “The Only Free Home Delivery Online Dog Store In Kuwait”. I checked their products list and they don’t have a lot of items plus the fact that they are calling dogs “beasts” kinda puts me off. The background music is also pretty out of place considering this is an online dog store and not a music shop. Anyway here is the link to see what I am talking about. [Link]

Introduction
In January I posted about my home theater setup and I mentioned I wanted to upgrade my aging old Kenwood receiver with something newer and better. Well a few days ago I passed by the Denon dealer in Salmiya to check out some AV Receivers and I ended up buying one. I did a lot of research online before I decided to upgrade my receiver and I came to the conclusion that for my budget and my needs, the Denon AVR-2106 fit the bill perfectly. I had previously seen the receiver when I tagged along with K.TheKuwaiti when he was getting a Denon for his living room and I remember the price was around KD175 since they were having discounts. So I passed by the Salmiya dealer and I looked around and I couldn’t find the Denon AVR-2106. I asked the salesman about it and he told me they were out of stock but he would check to see on the computer if any of the other branches had any left. Two minutes later he tells me he found one more piece left, but its the display model in the Hawalli branch. I am not good at price haggling at all, in-fact there is only one person I have ever met that was worse then me and thats TivoGuy, but I went ahead and asked the guy how much discount extra would he give me since it was the display model. He checked on his computer and told me the lowest he could give me the amp was for KD161. I was like stunned, I wasn’t planning on getting the receiver, I was just checking on the price, but now with this special price it was just soo fucking tempting to resist. So I tell the guy OK and he was like give me a minute to call the Hawalli branch and make sure they still have it. Five minutes later he comes back to me and tells me that the receiver they have in stock is actually not displayed and is still brand new in the box. I was like thats great but I still just want to pay KD161. The salesman laughed and said that wouldn’t be a problem since I was a good customer. I couldn’t believe what a good deal I was getting, I quickly paid the money and went and picked up the receiver from the Hawalli branch.

Since I have off from work till Monday due to the Kuwait National and Liberation day, I went ahead and downloaded a couple of movies to watch. Here they are:

Brokeback Mountain
Capote
Colin Farrell Sex Tape
One Night In Paris Hilton
The New World
The Weather Man
Transamerica
Waiting

I am really busy at work today trying to finish up some jobs before our long weekend. Hopefully during this vacation I will find time to post some cool stuff. For example I have these cool vintage pictures of Kuwait Airways which I need to get scanned, once I do I will post them here. I will be carrying my camera around also during the vacation taking pictures, I haven’t done that since I finished with Miskan. Once I get some cool pictures I will also post them online here. Its going to be a fun weekend.

Although I had my camcorder prepared next to my bed in anticipation of this evenings talent show, the band formally known as idiots never showed up. I hope they just postponed the show till the weather drys up, I really want everyone to hear how weird and annoying these guys sounded singing in the middle of the night.

I was just checking out Frankom’s site when I found a picture of this guy above. If you have ever been to any of the popular malls in Kuwait you MUST have seen this guy atleast once. It seems he goes by the nickname Shark and you could usually spot his Blue vintage Bugatti or yellow T-Rex parked outside Starbucks in Salmiya opposite Fanar. I sometimes see him at Souk Sharq during my lunch break and Marina Mall during the evening and I always wonder if this guy has a job or not since he is always hanging out at cafes. Anyway you can check out more pictures of the Shark at his website. Maybe next time I see him I will try to find out what he does for a living. [Link]

For the past two days I have been waking up in the middle of the night to young men singing in the street. I live in Salmiya high street (thats what it used to be called in the old days) and my apartment is located on top of a shopping mall which is located right on main road. The guys park their cars in-front of the mall, turn up the radio loud and start singing. The first night this happened at 4:30AM, yesterday it happened at 3AM. On the first night they were singing a sad Arabic song which was kinda eerie waking up to but yesterday night they seemed to be in a better mood since the music seemed “happier” and they sounded like they were dancing to it while singing.

They are FUCKING ANNOYING! I mean what the hell is wrong with these people. If we had alcohol in Kuwait you would think they were drunk or something but what the fuck is wrong with these guys? Don’t they have jobs they have to wake up early for? I think tonight if they wake me up I am just going to start randomly throwing eggs in their direction and hopefully hit some fucker. I did that once when I was in high-school, we went up to the tall building in front of ASK and once the students started coming out of the main gate me and some friends started throwing eggs down at them. Really funny stuff..

Update: I added a picture above to show why I chose eggs as my weapon of choice and not a paintball gun or a bucket of hot boiling oil. I basically don’t have direct line of sight because of the way my building is shaped. My only options were either water balloons or eggs since you don’t need a direct line of sight for those. In the end I decided to go with eggs since I could throw them further. Anyone remember the old Dos Basic game where you had 2 gorillas, one on each side of the screen with buildings in between and you had to throw something in a calculated arc to try and hit the other gorilla? Well this is going to work the same way.

Ok, I believe I have officially overdosed on Choowy Goowy cookies. I had a dozen on my way to work today morning and I had 5 more after lunch plus yesterday I brought the super large jar of 5 dozen cookies to work and I don’t know how many of those I ate. I still have 4 more jars left at home! So many cookies so little time. By the way, anyone know where I can get Cookie Monster stuff here in Kuwait?

Update: Forza was nice enough to share this link with us. Its cookie monster in rehab! [Link]

This is a video of a BMW M3 racing against a chipped Porsche Cayenne Turbo in Kuwait. Notice that the M3 slams on the gas after the Porsche starts to accelerate. I love M3’s. [2.8MB WMV]

[source q8speed]

Thursday afternoon I drove all the way to Ahmadi so that I could take Geo our pet dog to the International Veterinary Hospital. I read from peoples comments on my site that IVH was the best veterinary hospital in Kuwait and I now believe that to be true.

I used to take our previous family dog to the vet in Shuwaikh near the Friday Market. That place was really dirty and I never felt comfortable there neither did my dog. But then again my dog never felt comfortable leaving the house and he “hated” strangers. Still, when my dog got sick that hospital really didn’t do anything and we finally had to put our dog to sleep. Since I didn’t want the same thing to happen to Geo I decided to take him to the best vet in Kuwait and all signs pointed to IVH.

Driving out to Ahmadi from my home in Salmiya took 30 minutes. The map on their website was very easy to follow and we never got lost. When we arrived to the hospital it was like arriving to a ranch in Arizona or somewhere in the Australian outback, it didn’t look anything like your usual Kuwait. To get to the hospital you have to drive off the main road down a paved path surrounded by desert bushes on the side and very little if any buildings around. You then come in through a large gate where you find two signs, one pointing to the emergency entrance and the other towards the visitors parking. We parked in the very clean and very spaced out parking lot and walked towards the main hospital building. I couldn’t believe how gorgeous the place was, there was green grass everywhere, large palm trees, no trash and everything looked really good, better then our hospitals!

We walked into the hospital and told the employees that we had an appointment and then we took a seat while we waited for our turn. The waiting room was very cozy, the benches had cushions on them and their were tons of magazines to read. Their were 4 other dogs in the waiting room with us, 3 labrador puppies and one Japanese breed. Geo spent most of his time playing with the Japanese dog which was very cute. When Geo finally got bored we took him back outside to play on the grass where he met another dog and started to play with him. Finally around 15 minutes later it was our turn to go in.

The vet was a very nice friendly guy and Geo ended up liking him a lot. When the vet asked us what we were feeding the dog, we told him raw meat… to our surprise the vet didn’t try to convince us it was not good for him like most vets would do. Instead, he turned out to know about the raw meat diet and how its the best diet for Geo. He started asking us if Geo was getting all his vitamins and proteins and what else we were feeding him. We told him we were also giving Geo raw eggs twice a week, One large yogurt spoon twice a week and brown toast with honey once a week. We also told him Geo wasn’t getting any Vitamin A or B since he wasn’t eating any of his vegetables, so he gave us some vitamins to give to Geo once a day until he started eating his vegetables. The vet then started asking us questions about how we were treating him and how the toilet training was going and he started giving us advice and tips which we already new about. And thats what I liked about the vet, he was telling me stuff I already knew, but the thing is I had to research my ass off to find out and learn all this stuff from various websites, breeders and people with different opinions. Its not stuff you learn at vet school but stuff you learn with experience after years of raising dogs yourself and this vet knew all the best methods and techniques and that gave me a lot of confidence in him. My previous dogs vet never asked me any thing and never gave me any kind of tips. This vet on the other hand was giving me a lot of tips and telling me all the right stuff. He’s amazing, he knows what he is talking about and I could have a decent conversation with him about my dog. We told the vet we wanted to start Geo on worming and he agreed and gave him the medicine. Finally we were done and we walked out thanking the vet. Our bill? KD12.500 and that included KD7 for the visit, KD1 for the worming medicine and KD4.5 for the vitamins. Not bad at all. I scanned the full price list and I have it linked at the end of this post for those of you that are interested.

Once we left the vets office we decided to walk around outside and discover the hospital more. We past by their pet shop which was pretty cool and had a ton of stuff. We also past by the agility course which looked like something Geo would really enjoy once he grows up. Finally we let Geo run around a bit on the grass before we decided to head back home.

I was really impressed with the hospital and I feel a lot more better knowing something like that exists in Kuwait. The only downside to the place is the location but I couldn’t find anything else and thats why I am going to give this hospital a 4.5 out of 5.

Click here to view pictures of the hospital
Click here to view the prices at the hospital
Click here for the IVH website

This is what 5 dozen Choowy Goowy cookies look like 🙂