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This is going to be one of my venting posts on Salmiya. The sidewalks situation on Salem Mubarek Street in Salmiya is a horrible mess. It’s a very pedestrian heavy strip, and probably gets the most amount of foot traffic compared to any other strip in Kuwait, yet the sidewalks are miserable.

There are a number of issues with the sidewalks in Salmiya including:
– lack of wheelchair or stroller friendly sidewalks
– building construction occupying the whole sidewalk
– large bushes taking up the whole sidewalk (pictured above)
– sidewalks that have deteriorated
– sidewalks that were opened up for work but never put back together right

Yesterday I spotted the woman in the photo above with her two kids having to get off the sidewalk and walk in the street because of a large bush. Recently I’ve also been noticing a man in an electric wheelchair roaming around Salmiya occupying the same road as the cars. It’s a total mess but of course nobody cares.

/end rant

While we’re on the subject of airlines…

British Airways
Not sure how its possible but BA always seem to have the cheapest business class tickets to the States; at least to LA, and by always I mean whenever I want to go. And I’m talking like 40-50% cheaper than anybody else. So if you’re planning on traveling to the States check out their prices now since there is a promo running. [Link]

Qatar Airways
If you missed out on the Qatar Airways offers during Eid it came back yesterday. I got a ridiculously great priced ticket for a trip to Europe next month, literally half the price of competition. So again if you’re looking to travel soon, check their prices out as well. [Link]

Etihad
Finally, in case you missed this bit of news yesterday, you can now carry electronics onboard your flights to the US if you’re flying with Etihad. They’re the only airline in the region which you can now carry electronics onboard US flights. [Link]

Cinescape have finally given their website a much needed facelift and just in time before Eid. The new website makes looking for, and booking a movie a much faster experience with a lot less clicking and page reloads.

When you first enter the website you have all the movies currently showing listed, if you’re looking for movies playing in a specific Cinescape location, you just click on the location on the left sidebar and it will filter out all the movies not playing in that location without having to reload the page. Booking is also a much quicker process now with the quick book option and overall you can do a lot more now without having to leave the main page. The website also looks pretty great on mobile browsers.

The only thing that seems to be missing in the new redesign is the banned movies section. Cinescape used to have a page where they would list all the movies that were banned by the MOI and it seems they’ve now removed that in this new version of the website.

If you want to check out their new website, click [Here]

New bylaws were passed yesterday that now allow some businesses to operate legally with a license from their homes (aka home business). There are some requirements to obtain this license including the following:

– Kuwaitis only can apply for a home license
– Must be older than 21 years old
– You need permission from the home owner
– The license is mostly for services such as designers, calligraphist, illustrators, photographers, web and app developers, watchmakers, gardeners, technicians, event planners, translators, museums, and so on.
– No cupcakes, or burgers or any other food businesses can be licensed from homes

The Ministry of Commerce does not want to turn residential areas into commercial areas, they still want homes to be homes but a lot of businesses don’t involve a lot of interaction with customers or require customers to come over and so it doesn’t make sense that those businesses require a commercial space. The ministry has stated that the above law will come into effect first day after Eid.

I want to dedicate this post to my dear friend Ahmed Al Gharabally who recently passed away. Ahmed was a lobbyist and an activist that worked really hard on bringing this law to life through @legalizekw, a campaign that was launched to make home business in Kuwait legal. May you RIP Ahmed. It is great to see young Kuwaitis actively suggest new laws, and the new and young minister of commerce and industry Mr. Khaled Al Roudhan has done a wonderful job listening to their suggestions and attending their events.

For any legal inquiries, please email me on [email protected] and my team or I will get back to you within 24 hours.

Post by Fajer Ahmed – Legal Counsel
The legal opinions expressed in this post are those of the author Fajer. Opinions expressed by Mark or any other writer on mark248am1.wpenginepowered.com are those of the individual’s and in no way reflect Fajer’s opinion.

A couple of months back, Fitbit sent me their latest fitness tracker to review, the Alta HR. I’m a mechanical watch kind of guy and so don’t own an Apple Watch so figured this would be a good alternative. I’d be able to keep wearing my mechanical watches on one wrist, and a fitness tracker on the other.

The Fitbit Alta HR is a pretty great looking tracker, it’s slim and looks like a regular rubber bracelet and so can be worn on the opposite wrist of your watch and not look like you’re wearing two watches. The biggest selling point for me with the Fitbit was the fact it had a heart rate monitor. I’ve been going to spinning quite a bit and was curious to know how many calories I was burning exactly. Since the Fitbit could monitor my heart rate, I assumed it would be great at that one job… it wasn’t. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Alta HR has a pretty simple and straight forward screen that can display the time, your heart rate, how many steps you’ve done, how many calories you’ve burned and a bunch of other information. You flip through the screens by tapping the screen and using the Fitbit app on your phone, you can even customize what information you want to show on the screen and in what order. So in my case the first screen would show me my heart rate, second screen the calories burned, followed by my active minutes and finally the battery life.

I like the screen because of its simplicity but I hate the responsiveness of it. I have quick view turned off since I don’t want the screen to turn on randomly when I raise or flick my wrist, so to turn the screen on I need to tap it. Problem is, 99% of the time it doesn’t turn on with the first tap, 70% of the time it doesn’t turn on with the second tap, 30% of the time it doesn’t turn on with the 3rd tap either. I have to tap the screen a few times to get it to wake up and thats very frustrating. The other major issue I have with the Alta HR is that the heart rate monitor doesn’t seem to work when I’m sweaty which is when I need it to work the most since thats when I’m working out. During spinning when I’m curious to see my heart rate, I need to tap a few times on the screen to turn it on and when it finally would come on I’d get “–” which means it can’t read my heart rate. Then the screen shuts off again and I tap it a few times to wake it up and I get “–” again. Then the screen shuts off and I tap it again a few times and suddenly its reading my heart rate and showing “148” or whatever my heart rate is at that moment. So much work and in the middle of spinning its really unpractical.

The worst part is it doesn’t seem to be accurate at all. Saturday I ditched my gym and didn’t do any exercise other than binge watch season 2 of “F is for Family” and my Fitbit says I burned 2,995 calories that day. Yesterday on the other hand I had 45 minutes of spinning and my Fitbit says I burned 3,084 calories all day. It won’t do the one thing I wanted the Fitbit to do which is let me know how many calories I’m burning during spinning. It doesn’t make any sense.

On the bright side, it does seem to be good at doing one thing really well, monitoring my sleep. The Fitbit is pretty accurate in knowing when you fall asleep and when you wake up. It also uses your heart rate to monitor how much deep sleep you’re getting, if you’re waking up in the middle of the night and how much light sleep you’re getting. So if you want to monitor your sleeping patterns this is actually a pretty great tracker for that. Another great feature is the ability to vibrate when you get a phone call or message. My phone is always on silent and I tend to not notice it vibrating sometimes. Now my wrist vibrates as well and so I haven’t missed a call ever since I started wearing the Fitbit. Battery life on this thing is also fantastic, it lasts around a week of constant use which means you don’t have to constantly be charging it.

Overall though I’m pretty disappointed with the Alta HR. The biggest selling point for me was the ability to monitor my heart rate and let me know how many calories I was burning but that didn’t work out as planned. The FitBit Alta HR is selling for around KD54 on [Xcite] and KD59 on [Blink]. Here is a link to the official Fitbit Alta HR product page [Link]

A few years ago I posted about my favorite place to print digital photos, Boushahri off of Baghdad Street in Salmiya. Since that post two things have happened, first they merged or got bought out (not sure which) by their old competitor Ashkanani who used to be located across the street from them. The second thing that happened is they changed locations.

Saturday night I passed by their old Baghdad Street location to print some photos and found them closed. So I passed by yesterday morning and they were still closed. I just figured their Ramadan timings were weird and I was missing them. Then by chance last night, I was walking over from my apartment building to the ATM machine in the building next door when I came across their new location. I recognized all the employees before I noticed the sign outside and walked in. Turns out they had just moved to the new location this past Saturday.

Ashkanani can print your digital photos in various sizes, I usually print them in 10×15 and it costs 150fils per photo. For film lovers they also sell 35mm film in their store and they can also develop any size of film including 35mm and 120mm (as long as its color film).

So if you’re looking for a place to develop your photos, here is their location on [Google Maps]. If you’re driving there then I would recommend you park in the lot next to McDonalds across the street.

Update: Found a cheaper and quicker place to develop film. Click here for more info.

Last weekend, Staged in Kuwait put on a Beauty and the Beast musical and supposedly it was their best show yet. So they’ve decided to bring it back for one more show this coming Friday. If you missed out then this is your chance to watch it.

The photo and video above is from last weekends performance and if you’re interested in finding out more about event then click [Here]

If you’re a PostaPlus MyBox user then here’s two pieces of good news:

1) They now have an iPhone app that will allow you to track your packages without having to log in every time to the app
2) You can now pay for your packages online (website and app)

The online payment is what I’m the most excited about since they’ve been promising it for a few years now. I hate carrying cash and if I’m not in the office when the delivery guy comes, it always meant someone else had to pay for the package on my behalf. Now at least I can get the payment sorted and just have the delivery guy drop off the package.

If you’re interested in downloading the app, here is the [Link]

The Sheikh Abdullah Al Salem Cultural Centre is currently one of the largest cultural and science projects in the world and once complete will house four museums, Natural History, Science, Islamic and Space.

Construction of the museums was already completed and currently the exhibits are being fitted. As you can imagine, there is a lot of logistics that goes into a project of this magnitude. Here is an excerpt from a recent article on the museum fit-out specialist BECK who are working on this project:

On international projects, there is a greater demand for technology, the use of more demanding and higher materials specifications, higher density of exhibits to floor space, the need for continuous communication on every level and the need for staff to be on location 100 per cent of the time.

This is illustrated at the Sheikh Abdullah Al Salam Cultural Centre where one small area is a live rain forest with soil, irrigation and newly planted trees (combined with specially manufactured scenically created trees and plants), which all back up to a one million litre aquarium with acrylic panels that are 500mm thick to contain the water.

“We have more than 150 multi-media requirements and about 20 films to be shot. Because of the climate there are only really two months that you can film in Kuwait – January and February – to get a good quality image. So, if you have a two-year project you have four months to do all your filming. If you miss that slot you delay the project for a year.” [Source]

If you’re interested in reading more articles similar to that then here are a few you could go through, if you know of any more let me know about them:

BECK – international museum fit-out: breaking the boundaries of what’s possible
International museum fit-out – UK specialists taking on the world
The Hub – from UK blockbusters to mega projects abroad

The cultural centre is slated to open by the end of the year. For renderings and more information on the project, click [Here]

If you missed the car park drift competition this past weekend, someone made of a video of the whole thing and uploaded it online. It’s a pretty good video (minus the music) and Sirbb Circuit seems like the perfect venue for this event. [Vimeo]

If you missed ComFest Con this past weekend, UrbanQ8 has a video recap of it which you can watch above (warning, its SUPER long). According to a friend of mine who goes to all the comic festivals that take place here, this one was the best one yet and will probably end up being THE comfest for Kuwait.

A few years ago I posted about a Kuwaiti violin maker and since its a slow news week, I decided to repost that article. You can check the original post [Here] but I’ve also copy pasted it below. It’s a very interesting story if you haven’t read it before:

Article originally posted on July 24th, 2013

Last night I passed by and met Haitham Al-Ghareeb, a local violin maker. We met at his small cozy workshop in Rawda located right outside his home. When you walk into his dimly lit workshop you’ll see a small diwaniya on the left with around a dozen violins hanging on the wall, while on the right hand side is his workstation where he crafts all his violins. He filled a kettle with water and put it on a small electric stove next to him and we started talking.

Back in 2000, Haitham was a oud player but was interested in getting into violins. He started looking for a good violin to buy in Kuwait but he couldn’t find any. Most of the violins available in the market back then were of poor quality from low end brands. That’s why Haitham decided to make his own violin using documents and instructions he found online.

Haitham hadn’t crafted any musical instruments before, he had dabbled with some minor oud repair but nothing major. This got me even more curious, how can a 25 year old with no previous woodworking skills be able to craft such a delicate instrument as a violin? Well the answer I believe might be in his genes. Haitham’s father, grand father and great grand father were all dhow builders. Woodworking had existed in his family for generations and it was just natural for him to be good at it.

Haitham’s first violin wasn’t flawless, it had mistakes and was made using locally sourced wood but yet the sound it produced to his ears was beautiful. This encouraged him to build a second better violin with imported tonewood (wood cut specifically for musical instruments). He started frequenting forums and participating in online communities where other violin craftsmen from around the world would share their tips and techniques. His violins kept improving with every build and soon he had his own tips and tricks to share with the community. He loved crafting violins so much that he quickly forgot about wanting to play them. He became obsessed in building and perfecting his own creations.

When Haitham first started making violins he was spending 4 hours a day working on them and each violin would take around 2 months to complete. Nowadays he’s too busy with work and family so it takes him around 9 months to complete a single violin. But he’s fine with that. He never started making violins with the intention to turning it into a profitable business. Even his prices have remained the same over the years even though his violins kept getting better and demand for them kept increasing. He just loves making violins and isn’t interested in expanding. It’s a hobby he’s just really good at. He also does a lot of repair work on violins which to many musicians is a lifesaver. Musicians bond with their instruments and having a local violin maker means that a damaged violin no longer needs to be discarded but instead can be repaired. Only two of the violins hanging on the wall were his, the rest were either in for repair or were being sold by other musicians.

Once we were done with the interview, Haitham served us some tea. Throughout the whole interview which lasted around 40 minutes I had watched him make us the tea using two kettles, a can filled with what I assume is tea leaves and a box filled with I don’t know what. He then skillfully poured the tea from the large kettle into three glasses that were sitting amongst a dozen on the table in front of us. The tea was delicious and to me summarized the kind of person that Haitham is, a perfectionist.

If you’d like to contact Haitham for any reason you can do so by emailing him on [email protected]

I think speed bumps serve a great purpose considering how people speed on inside streets, but I hate how in Kuwait majority of the speed bumps have no visible markings and just blend in with the streets at night.

With my FJ I don’t really care much because if I miss one it’s no big deal, I can just fly over the bump and its a bit of discomfort for a second. But with my Lotus its a completely different story. I can’t just fly over the speed bumps accidentally, I actually missed a speed bump last week and it was the scariest thing ever with my front spoiler lip digging into the tarmac and throwing up little pebbles in the air. I thought for sure I broke something but luckily nothing happened.

Can we get clear white stripes on the speed bumps? I know majority of speed bumps start life off with white stripes, but once they start fading they should be remarked again. It’s not that complicated a problem to solve…

That was pretty quick, the spelling mistakes on the Kuwait e-Visa website got fixed today, two days after I posted about them. Thank you to whomever fixed them, just one more minor thing cuz I’m a bit OCD, could you make the letter “b” capital for the word “Building”. Pretty please? Thank you!

Over the weekend I had to use the Kuwait e-Visa website to apply for a visit visa for my mum. While filling in her details I noticed some major spelling mistakes, ones I’m surprised haven’t been fixed already since the website has been active since last summer. Here are the mistakes just from the partial screenshot above of the e-Visa form:

– biulding should be building
– forth should be fourth
– governate should be governorate
– flour should be floor

Since this website is being used by visitors hoping to get entry into Kuwait, it’s not really a great first impression, and we haven’t even discussed the 90s look of the website either.

When I applied for my mums visa on Friday, it got denied the first time and even the denied page had a major grammatical error. “Your eVisa application was been denied” should be either “has been denied” or “was denied”.

If I’m correcting spelling and grammatical errors, then you can imagine how bad things are.

I applied for my mums visa again yesterday and it got approved the second time around. Completely random. On the plus side, even though it was the weekend, the approval/rejection process took a few hours and was pretty fast.

So whoever is in charge of the website, please fix these mistakes. I haven’t checked the other pages but I’d imagine there are probably mistakes on those as well.

Update: Spelling has been fixed!