Search: “mis”

Was talking to some friends today and I remembered the Bony sign at the zoo so I figured I would reshare it with everyone. Here are more pictures taken at the zoo in case anyone is interested. [Pictures]

Kuwait’s first short film festival at Shaab park.
Date: Wednesday, December 13th and Thursday, December 14th
Price: Tickets are for free.

Below is the running order of the movies from the festival. Book your tickets at [email protected]

I love Montreal. Its my favorite place on the planet. Since Christmas is nonexistent in Kuwait and since Nat has never been anywhere other then Lebanon and Kuwait I figured we would spend Christmas and New Years in Montreal. I was looking forward to binging on Labatt Blue while stuffing myself with poutine. Nat on the other hand was looking forward to the Tiesto concert on New Years night. We had everything planned and ready, only thing missing was Nats visa to Canada. I don’t need a visa because I have the Canadian citizenship.

Around a week ago we sent Nats passport and all the forms and papers needed to the Canadian Embassy in Abu Dhabi (local embassy don’t do visas). Visa costs like KD18 while DHL with a return airway bill costs KD55. So thats KD73 for a one time entry visa.

Today Nat got her passport back and guess what? They refused to give her a visa! Their reason was the following:

You have not satisfied me that you meet the requirements of Regulation 179; that you would leave Canada at the end of the temporary period if you were authorized to enter. In reaching this decision I considered your ties to your country of residence/citzenship balanced against factors which might motivate you to stay in Canada.

In summary, they think Nat will basically go to Canada, tear up her passport and request asylum. How did they come up with this conclusion? Its because she is Lebanese. How much more discriminating can they be? No one called her to talk to her, no one called her in for an interview, they didn’t even care that her husband is a Canadian.

I am extremely pissed off now because it basically means I can no longer go to Canada unless I am alone, which isn’t going to happen as long as I am married. Tomorrow I will be calling up the embassy and giving someone there a piece of my mind. No way am I gonna accept the fact that some stranger all the way in the UAE is going to ruin my Christmas!

After going to sleep early last night I woke up around 9AM today and decided I would go out for a ride. By 9:30 I was downstairs in full gear warming up my bike. Today I even put on my Alpinestars Knee Guard which I should have worn the day I had my crash because it would have saved my knee from getting road rash. Its kind of bulky but its not about the looks, its about the protection. One thing I forgot to do with all my excitement was brush my teeth which was a big mistake because I ended up spending the whole ride smelling my Friday morning breath inside the helmet.

I had 3 rules for my ride today:
(1) Keep off the Gulf Road
(2) On traffic lights, go straight or right but not left (since I had my accident while going left)
(3) Stay clear of roundabouts

Well I broke one of the rules. I ended up going out onto the Gulf Road but just for a tiny bit. My bikes gas light came on and I figured I might as well fill it up with gas, something I hadn’t done before. But before I got onto the Gulf Road I rode into the AUK parking lot and decided to do some riding exercises which involved lots of driving around in circles and braking and accelerating. Once I felt comfortable with the bike I rode out of the parking lot and headed towards the Gulf Road. I ended up going to the gas station opposite Pizza Hut. I was hoping I would find some of that ultra super high octane gas (the green one) but turned out they only had the regular and super versions. It was my first time filling up gas in my bike and I felt awkward. First I didn’t know how to open the gas gasket, the key wasn’t turning in the gasket lock so I called up Marzouq who told me I needed to push the key in and turn which worked. Second I didn’t know how much gas the bike would take but I kept filling it slowly until I could see the gas line in the tank. I filled up 550fils worth of super gas and rode back out onto the Gulf Road and then back into Salmiya.

In total today I rode for around an hour and a half. I would have stayed out longer but my wrist started hurting so I had to come back home. The weather was amazing and I spent most of my ride riding with the helmet visor open so that the wind blew in onto my face . I really had a lot of fun, can’t wait for my next ride.

Finally got my iPod Shuffle from Amazon. Its really tiny, a lot smaller then it looks. You need to hold it in your hand to really understand how small the thing is. The package should really contain a spare shuffle since it would be so easy to misplace one.

I found out last minute I had to go down to Dubai for work and since Gitex had just started, finding a room was practically impossible. Finally though the travel agent came through and found me an empty room and booked it. I have to say it was the crappiest hotel I had ever been to. The whole place looked like a bathroom and smelled like one that had just been cleaned. They had these air fresheners that spray perfume automatically located all over the hotel but they just reminded me too much of bathrooms.

If the look of the hotel wasn’t enough to put me off, before we got the room key they made us sign a paper which said if any of our stuff goes missing in the rooms that they wouldn’t be responsible for it. Not only that but inside the room there was a framed photocopy of a similar paper stating the same thing and another A4 sheet located on the table also saying the same thing. As you can imagine I didn’t want to leave anything in the room and I didn’t, I kept my backpack with me the whole time.

Traffic in Dubai because of Gitex was just a disaster. It was always at a complete standstill, a real mess. One cab driver told me things get even worse in February during the shopping festival.

The weather in Dubai was also a lot hotter then Kuwait. Its currently freezing here. Froze my ass off tonight while leaving Maki at Marina, even had a jacket on and it wasn’t enough!

I wanted to visit Gitex but I finished my work around 8PM and Gitex closes at 7. Why can’t they stay open till like 10 or something like exhibitions that are held in Kuwait? Its like people need to take a day off work to pass by them.

I went to Ibn Battuta mall. Its not as big as Mall of the Emirates but its still a lot bigger then Marina Mall and the whole thing felt very Las Vegasishy.

I still can’t believe I was in Dubai and didn’t get to pass by Gitex!

On my way to work today as I was passing Souk Sharq on the Gulf Road I saw a few police cars parked on the side and an ambulance. They were parked on the curb near where all the old wooden fishing boats park and it looked like something bad had happened. There was a large crane also parked and I figured something must have gone wrong. So I parked my car and walked towards the crowd. As I was passing the police barrier to get to the other side two cops stopped me and asked me if I was “joumhoor” meaning crowd in Arabic. I used my Miskan technique and just pretended I didn’t speak a word of Arabic, pointed towards my camera and then towards the sea. They were like OK and they let me stay in the restricted area.

Anyway turns out they were salvaging a boat that had sunk. Their were scuba divers in the water and it seems the ambulance was there just in case anything goes wrong. I snapped a few pictures and then left back to work.

I was planning on going to the 4×4 event which is currently being held at the Mishref Fairgrounds, but after checking out some pictures taken there I don’t think I am gonna anymore. It looks really boring compared to the one they held last year at Marina Crescent. [Pictures]

The Strong Man Competition is going to be held at the Hilton Kuwait Resort this Friday the 10th of November. The event starts at 10AM to 5PM. For more information and pricing you can contact Hilton on 3725500.

update: Admission is KD12.5 and that includes food and drinks.

update2: here is the poster of the event. (Thanks Moustapha) [Poster]

I live in Salmiya, Salam Mubarek Street. The “old” Salmiya. I live right on the main shopping street and have been living on this street for most of my life.

Pre 1990 I was living in the building that had A&W, after 1990 I moved to the building across the street from it and thats where I have been living ever since. As you can imagine, I know the street very well. How well?

I remember The New Super Market before it closed down, I remember when Dairy Queen was open here and then shut down and Jashanmal opened instead. I remember buying my Thermos metal lunch box with the Dukes of Hazzard picture on it from there. I remember the night A&W opened with Mister Donuts right next to it. I remember when Majda el Roumi the famous singer came to open a perfume store right across the street from my building. I remember Hungry Bunny, I remember how after they renovated a cookie store opened inside it which had the best chocolate chunk cookies ever. I also remember the sad day when that cookie area inside got closed down.

I remember the high end stores like Channel, Versace and Cartier. It was a high end street and Rolex and Mercedes are still open here today serving as a reminder to what was once a beautiful street. I remember when Kids R Us opened and I remember what was there before it opened and after it closed. I remember the most popular music stores of their time, Soul II Soul, Bells and Swan Lake. I remember buying my original copy of Windows 95 from Computer World, I remember the small video game store on the ground floor of the same building, he had a NeoGeo in the display and I used to watch the Samurai Showdown demo play while I gazed through the glass hoping to own the system one day. I got my first Swatch from Fay stationary, I remember getting my Peter and Jane books from Family Bookshop. Fay shutdown, Family Bookshop is surprisingly still open.

Well my Salmiya isn’t what it used to be. All the upper scale stores shut down and everyones attention moved up to the Sultan Center area. All thats left here are low end stores all selling the same shit. The whole street has turned into a garbage dump. The sidewalk tiles are damaged, the trees look unhealthy, and the worst thing of all, Salmiya is slowly slowly losing its soul.

I was taking a late night walk just a while ago and I noticed the building that housed Swan Lake was going to get demolished. Thats when I realized I need to do something.

Why do old buildings get demolished and not refurbished? Salmiya (and Kuwait even) would look so much nicer if the old buildings were just redone up. Look at what was done with Beirut. They could have demolished everything and sprung up modern glass buildings but instead they decided to keep Beirut’s soul intact. Why can’t that be done here? My Salmiya really has a lot of history, how many other shopping streets in Kuwait can even begin to compare. No other has sidewalks wider then here nor is any other street located in such a good location. No other street has as much history! The Swan Lake building has a style, it can be cleaned up, updated and reopened but instead its going to get demolished and replaced by a cheap ass low end tiny crappy wannabe mall.

I want to be elected as the mayor of Salmiya. I would clean it up, repaint it, re-tile it and revive it. I don’t know who the mayor is now (if there is even such a position here in Kuwait) but I do know that he can’t be a true Salmiya dweller or else he wouldn’t let it die and rot like this. Vote for me, I won’t let everyone down.

Auction it TODAY is basically a company that will take care of selling your stuff on eBay. A Kuwait branch was announced awhile back but they just very recently opened up shop. I called them up to get an idea of how their service works and this is what I found out. Just a note, I am not 100% positive about the information below because the person I spoke to wasn’t very clear over the phone. But this basically what I understood from him.

1) You bring your item to them

2) If you don’t have an idea how much your item is worth they will research and find out how much its worth on the market

3) They will take a picture of your item, post it on eBay and take care of shipping the item to the buyer and everything else

4) In return they take a commission fee. If your item sells for under $500, they take 38% commission. If your item sells for more then $500 they take a 30% commission. The commission fee is negotiable if you have a lot of items.

5) If you list your item without a reserve and no one buys it. You pay them only KD2. If you list and item with a reserve price and no one buys it, you pay them KD7.

Auction it TODAY is located in the Free Trade Zone near Movenpick , Building D-14. You can call them on 4613325.

I personally think its a cool service but the commission rate is just absurdly high. Is this normal? I have never used a service like this before so 30% could be the standard rate and I wouldn’t know.

Hello everyone, my name is Fawaz and I am responsible for marketing communication at Jazeera Airways, in addition to being an amateur blogger of course. We have been reading your questions about Jazeera Airways on this blog over the past few months. Questions that ranged from “how can we afford fares as low as KD 5?” To questions about our brand name. In an effort to answer all your questions, we recently asked Mark to gather questions you had for Jazeera Airways and in return we promised him that we would answer all of them, exclusively on this blog. Lets start

Mark: How can you afford to offer super low fares?

This is a great question that I will answer in two parts. First, we prefer to fly our planes full of travelers paying less per seat rather than flying with less travelers paying more. Other airlines prefer high fares and less passengers, which does not make sense to us. Why would they want to impact less people? For us, we enjoy flying people and being part of their lives.

The second part involves our business model that works to achieve high efficency and a lower operational cost base. In other words, we do more with less. We achieve our high efficiency by employing

1. state of the art technology to streamline processes
2. hardworking, multitasking, highly motivated team

In sum, we can afford super low fares because our business model is based on volume more than yield, and because we depend on leading technologies and great team to lower our cost.

Follow-up: How are you able to lower your cost?

We are able to maintain a lower cost base and high level of quality and safety through three main ways:

1- Recruitment- We recruit highly motivated and committed team members. This is crucial as it has direct impact on day-to-day cost. Being able to wear different ‘hats’ (so to speak) and do the work of several people is a quality we seek in and build in our team members. That’s why we call our people our ‘high flyers’.

2- Aircraft utilization – Aircraft on the ground do not make money, so we keep our aircraft in the air where they do make money. We achieve this through quick turn-arounds at the gate. Our planes arrive at a destination, wait for our travelers to disembark, board return travelers, and fly back to base ready to take off again in less than 45 minutes.

3- A fleet of single-type fleet: the Airbus A320.

If you had Porsche and a Ferrari and Lamborghini in your drive way, you would need three different specialized garages to service them with three different mechanics and three different spare parts inventories. On the other hand, if you had three Porsches you would only need to contract a single garage to service all three and your maintenance costs would be much lower. Aircraft are the same, though much more sophisticated. Allow me to elaborate.

If an airline had an A320, an A310, an A340, and a 777, they would need certified captains, first officers, cabin crew for each type of aircraft. In this case, if a 777 pilot falls sick with the flu, an A320 pilot cannot just jump in the captain’s seat of a 777 unless she is trained on a 777. Because of this, airlines with multiple aircraft types in their fleet need to have more pilots to cover scenarios like this, more engineers who do nothing but wait for someone to get sick, and spare parts inventories to cover all types. This creates redundancies and inneficiency.

In our case, we have an all-A320 fleet. We do not need to hire more crew since any of our crew can jump in any of our aircraft and take-off and any of our engineers is licensed to work on any of our aircraft, and our spare parts inventory covers all our aircraft.

4- Investment in Technology – By investing heavily into technology, we were able to raise efficiency, reduce operational cost and drive the price of tickets down even further. We currently employ over a dozen world class technology systems and tools that range from the booking systems we use to satellite aircraft monitoring that tells us the status and integrity of each aircraft while it is in the air no matter where it is on earth, and automatically dispatches support teams and parts to the destination airport if the situation required. These are only some of the benefits of having world class Lufthansa Technik engineers and technology working with us and for us.

I have this bad habit of miscalculating how much food I can eat during Ramadan. I spend the whole day without food and when its finally time to eat I over order. Today for example I had lunch at 6:30PM and I ended up going to Burger Boutique with Nat. We ordered 4 mushroom+swiss sliders, 4 midnight sliders, 4 west coast sliders and 1 street style pommes noisettes. Nat ended up eating two sliders, I had 7 and there were still 3 left. I actually should have stopped eating after 5 sliders but I didn’t and now I feel like I am going to blow up. I really should learn from my mistakes but I never seem to do so.

Today I got set up with an old 650cc Kawasaki bike. Since I was doing so well on the smaller 180cc bike I got moved up to the bigger one. I don’t like this new bike though, its too tall and feels weird. I had two “special” moments with the bike one of which was really scary and strange.

I was turning a curb with the bike going a bit quickly when for some reason instead of pressing the brakes to slow down I pulled on the clutch, then when I realized my mistake I panicked and turned the throttle for more power.. I don’t know why I did that instead of pressing the brakes but my next move was even worse… I let go of the clutch. After that everything went really quick and blurry, I just remember I put my two feet on the ground, then front wheel of the bike lifted up and I did a wheelie and then somehow I managed to control the bike like a wild horse, I pulled it back under me and continued riding. I was in like total shock cuz I should have been thrown to the floor.

The second moment I had with the bike was when I was coming to a stand still and I don’t know what happened but I lost balance and the bike fell down on its side. The problem is this bike was big and heavy so to put it back up was really difficult, but I managed without any help.

Today was Nat’s first lesson, I can’t say anything about it because she threatened to shutdown the blog if I do.. so you can imagine how her lesson went.

I complain too much, anyone who visits this site often will know that. I complain so much that its actually become part of my sites identity and thats not a good thing because I don’t want to be known as Mark, the guy who complains a lot. Not only that but my blog is also starting to get me in trouble.

So far in the past year my boss at work for example has been contacted four times by different companies I had complained about complaining to him about how I have been complaining about them. Luckily, my boss has been very understanding plus these issues just keep getting him more intrigued by this blog thing. But, I have also been pushing my luck.

For me, my blog world is a complete separate entity from my work world. But in reality they are not separate entities because I am not anonymous. I am the same person that goes to work every morning and also posts here at night. I chose not to be anonymous.

This is why I have decided I will no longer be complaining about large multimillion dollar corporations. You can call me a sell out, you can call me a chicken but in the end of the day you are not in my shoes. The blog is only a hobby and its not worth me losing my job, getting sued or getting arrested over. I just went through my blog and deleted a lot of posts which I believe at one point in the future can get me in trouble with the lawyers. So if anything is missing, now you know why.

Say hello to the new nicer me…