Search: “sti”

Gourmet Magazine have a feature article listing some of the best burgers from around the world and Kuwait made the list. The featured burger from Kuwait is the Kuwait City edition burger from Smashburger. I haven’t had Smashburger yet so I can’t vouch for them but I am curious to try it now. Here is the link to the full list [Link]

Thanks Nasser

If you’re familiar with Reddit then you should be familiar with IAMA (I Am A/Ask Me Anything). It’s when a person states what they do for a living and then allows people to ask them anything. An American girl going by the nickname GlitterNails posted “I was an “Alcohol Dealer” in a Islamic Country. AMA” and within the comments you quickly find out by Islamic country she meant Kuwait.

It’s an interesting read and if you’ve got the time check it out. Right now it has over 850 comments. [Link]

Thanks Z

Fehaid Aldeehani won a bronze medal earlier today at the Olympic double trap event. The only other Olympic medal Kuwait ever won was back at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and it was again because of Fehaid. Congrats! [Link]

Update: Turns out Fehaid came in 4th NOT 3rd. I misread the Yahoo article. 4th doesn’t win him any medals but it’s still a very respectable ranking that puts Kuwait on the map.

Last month I posted about the Flying Start Triathlon that is going to take place this coming October here in Kuwait and it got me thinking if it would be possible for me to compete. I think I’m in great shape since I’ve been working my ass off at Core Fitness for the past two years and I’ve been eating really healthy so I think I’m ready.

There are two distances in the Flying Start Triathlon and I’m hoping to complete The Sprint which is the shorter of the two. The running and biking seem very doable it’s the swimming I’m more concerned about. Currently I can swim across an Olympic sized pool horizontally once before collapsing in exhaustion and that’s only like 25 meters or something which is not even close to the 750m distance required in the race. That’s why I passed by The 3 Club who are the organizers of the event and asked them if they did any training. Turns out they did and starting next week I’ll be training with them twice a day every day.

There will be two sessions daily which rotate between biking, running and swimming exercises. I’m pretty nervous about this since I have no idea how I’m going to perform. Once I actually start the classes I’ll post my impressions here. So far my schedule for Ramadan looks like this:

5PM – Training with The 3 Club
7PM – Training at Core Fitness
10PM – Training with The 3 Club

Best part about this though is I’ll be eating WHATEVER I want since I’ll be burning so much calories. Fat Mark is going to make a comeback.. at least in a mental state.

The continuation for the Red Mango commercial has been released and I now think their commercials are my favorite this Ramadan (and yes I prefer it over the Qualitynet one). [YouTube]

If you missed out on the first part you can watch it [Here]

Update: I just noticed the video says part 2 of 3 which means there’s still another one left. I don’t mind a series of ads for the same campaign but I’m not a fan of one single ad divided into smaller parts. This is YouTube, you can release one long ad and not have to worry about the advertising cost…

Looks very futuristic. It’s not yet open to the public so you can’t experience it just yet. [YouTube]

Update: Vimeo video got set to private, YouTube video still active so I swapped the links

Update2: YouTube video has also been removed now

A reader made me realize that OSN subscribers can watch the Olympics online via OSN Play. They will have 10 different live streams broadcasting at the same time and you don’t need a VPN or anything of the sort to access the streams just a valid OSN subscription. Here is the [Link]

Some of you might already know that playing video games is a favorite hobby of mine and now I’ll be able to write about my thoughts on games as they get released here in Kuwait. Mark worked out a deal with the local online game rental service Digumz.com who will be providing the games for me as soon as they’re out. I’ll be reviewing a game every week or two depending on when they get released and if there aren’t any new releases I’ll probably write about an older game I find worth sharing.

This week I’ll be reviewing a fairly new release called Spec Ops: The Line, spoilers will be kept to a minimum.

[YouTube]

Spec Ops: The Line is not your ordinary war themed video game. It isn’t anything like Call of Duty, Battlefield or Medal of Honor. Spec Ops: The Line has a proper, mature script that will have you talking about the game long after you put the controller down. The gameplay is flawed and has trouble dealing with the issues that the script raises, but it’s still a lot of fun to play. Think of it this way: if Call of Duty is a Michael Bay movie, Spec Ops: The Line is Apocalypse Now (which it has been compared to). There was some controversy in our region due to the fact that the game takes place in a destructed Dubai. Personally, I don’t see what the big deal is. All major metropolises get destroyed in games and movies; how many times has New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo been demolished by either a giant monster, war or aliens? As far as I’m concerned, the fact that Dubai is destroyed in this game is a good thing. If the UAE government is concerned about the portrayal of their citizens, then they have nothing to worry about. In the game, Dubai may resemble real Dubai, but it’s not an exact replica. You’ll see skyscrapers that look like they should belong in Dubai, but you won’t see an exact copy of Burj Khalifa.

So I woke up this morning at around 4AM and for some odd reason started thinking about my previous Tesco posts. Originally last year I posted that Alshaya were bringing Tesco to the region. A month later I posted that Sultan Center had signed with Tesco and they were also bringing them to the region. Something didn’t click and it was around 5AM when I started sending out emails and doing a bit of investigating.

What I have managed to piece together is the following but please note this is just my theory based on bits and pieces of information I managed to gather. Last year Tesco representatives came to Kuwait and met with two parties with the aim of finding someone who would give them around 50 stores over a five year period across the MENA region. The two parties they met with were Sultan Center and Alshaya. My guess is that Alshaya signed a confidentiality agreement with Tesco which explains why they got really upset when they read my post. My source took the confidentiality agreement as a done deal which it wasn’t because a month later I posted Sultan Center had also signed with Tesco (Again most likely it was a confidentiality agreement). What I understand now is that Sultan Center is no longer in the picture and that Alshaya have most likely signed with Tesco… but to bring the brand Florence & Fred (F&F) to the region and not the supermarket. F&F is the clothing division of Tesco.

Disappointing news I know but theres light at the end of the tunnel. My opinion is that Alshaya will be bringing F&F to the region so they can build a relationship with Tesco. According to a previous interview with Mohammed Alshaya, he picked Tesco as the one brand he doesn’t have and one which he wants the most. So although it doesn’t look like Carrefour is going to be replaced with a Tesco supermarket anytime soon, I do believe that is the long term goal. By getting the F&F brand they’re putting their foot in the door and if everything goes well which I’m assuming it will, then we can expect Tesco supermarkets in the near future.

The popular Kuwait guide iPhone app Urban Moon just got a major update yesterday. The biggest difference I’ve noticed is the speed of the app. My biggest complaint with their previous version is that once you launched the app you had to wait a few seconds for it to download the latest phone numbers. Now the downloads take place in the background so you can start using the app as soon as you launch it.

Another new feature is that the app will now contain reviews. Currently restaurants in the app have a generic description but they’ve already started writing reviews and soon they’ll be swapping out the generic descriptions with honest reviews of the restaurants. That I think could be interesting and maybe even more so if they allow people to submit their own reviews similar to the Yelp app.

You can check out the full list of improvements and features in the Apple Store [Here]

The Al-Hasawi family promised if they took over Nottingham Forest they would offer Kuwaitis a chance to play for the team. Looks like they’re sticking to their promise because Kuwaiti footballer Bader Al-Mutawa is set to begin a month-long trial with Nottingham Forest.

Arabian Business have more details [Here]

Earlier today I got a press release from Avenues regarding their new Multi-Purpose Hall that’s being constructed as part of Avenues Phase III. Since I hadn’t heard any information for quite sometime on the Avenues mosque that was designed by Zaha Hadid (pictured above) I asked them about it. Turns out for some reason they decided not to build it! Turns out it was only a concept design but never got the go ahead.

I think that’s such a major disappointment. Zaha Hadid is such an incredible visionary and I’m 100% sure the mosque when completed would have looked a hundred times nicer than the rendering above. Just watch the video below and look at what she did with the Guangzhou Opera House in China.

[YouTube]

Imagine how beautiful and futuristic this mosque would have turned out to be. It would have been a landmark for sure and now it’s never going to happen. I’m pissed off.

I’ve had a love and hate relationship with the Sony NEX-7 even before I got my hands on it. Specs wise the camera is nearly flawless and Sony have somehow managed to fit a ton of great features into a really compact camera… that is until you mount the lens onto it. Thats where the hate comes in. Because the sensor on the Sony is so large, the lenses needed to be large which turned a very slim compact camera without a lens into a not so practical I might as well carry a DSLR size with the lens. In addition to that, the only lens I wanted for it cost as much as the camera itself. But, I’m an open minded person and I change my mind all the time and after trying the camera out it might have.

I picked up the Sony NEX-7K (comes included with a 18-55mm lens) last week from the Sony dealership along with the Zeiss 24mm f/1.8 lens. The Zeiss lens is the one I really wanted to try with the camera and it’s the one I ended up using 95% of the time. The packaging for the camera is one of the nicer ones out there and feels premium right away with the black velvety textured interior and the way the items are laid out. The camera is also solidly built and doesn’t weigh too much even with the lens on which was unexpected. The camera without the lens as I mentioned is very compact and could easily slide into a jeans pocket which makes me wish Sony releases more pancake lenses for the camera (currently they only have the 16mm f/2.8). There are two circular knobs on the back of the camera which are used to control certain options in the camera like aperture, shutter speed and exposure. The viewfinder is electronic but is the first one ever to use an OLED screen which means the blacks are really black. Finally there’s a high resolution tilt’able 3″ screen on the back which tilts down 45° and up 80°.

I took the camera and headed to Souk Mubarkia on Friday afternoon since I wanted to see how easy it would be to capture moving people. I got there as the sun was setting but the weather wasn’t really great and the lighting was very poor and flat. Still, I tried to make the best of it and started walking around snapping pictures. What I like about Souk Mubarkia is that it’s frequented a lot by tourists so the people there are not intimidated by cameras. One of the few places in Kuwait where you can snap away without worrying you’re going to offend anyone. I shot with the camera’s ISO set on Auto since I knew the camera had great ISO capabilities. My favorite feature in the camera has to be the tilt’able screen on the back. Most of my first digital cameras like the Nikon Coolpix 2500 and Sony F717 used to tilt and I used to like that. But lately none of the cameras I’ve purchased had such a feature and until I started using it again on the NEX-7 I had completely forgotten how practical it was. I actually found myself using the rear screen a lot more than the view finder but that might also have been because of the fact people are less aware you’re taking a picture of them when the camera isn’t plastered to your face. The camera is pretty fast and by fast I mean it focuses quickly and shoots instantly which really helped when I was walking around trying to capture certain moments. I did get some blurry shots, maybe around 4 or 5 shots out of a hundred but that mostly had to do with the poor lighting conditions and moving subjects. The Zeiss lens is superb and really is the lens to have for this camera.

I did have some issues with the camera. I was walking around Mubarkia with the camera on and in my hand ready to shoot at any moment, sometimes I’d have two hands holding it sometimes one. When I’d find a shot I’d raise my camera and shoot, thats when I started noticing two annoying issues. The first is the fact I thought the rear knobs were too easy to turn. Every time I put up the camera to shoot I would notice either the exposure compensation shifted or the aperture wasn’t what I had previously set. Maybe I’ve got fat fingers, or maybe I was just holding the camera wrong but if only the knobs were slightly more difficult to turn, that would have made a huge difference with my clumsy hands. The second issue I noticed is when I tried to shoot from my waist (only works with a tilt’able screen). I’d hold the camera with two hands from the sides and then suddenly the rear LCD would go dark for a second or two. It happened a few times before I realized what was going on. The viewfinder has a sensor that detects when the camera is close to your face so it shuts off the screen and turns on the viewfinder. Somehow while holding the camera my thumb was sometimes passing in front of the sensor which was shutting off the screen. Annoying to say the least but by the end of the day I had gotten used to keeping my thumb away from that area.

So is it still a love and hate relationship? The answer isn’t that straight forward. The camera is ridiculously good and if I hadn’t taken the shots myself I would have guessed they were taken with a DSLR and that’s because the NEX-7 is basically a DSLR in a compact body. Where my view on the camera hasn’t changed is with the size. It’s not a compact camera. Yes, it is more compact than a DSLR that’s for sure but it doesn’t compete with Point & Shoots in the same way the Panasonic GX1 or Leica X2 do. The NEX-7 competes against the bigger guys and if you’re looking for DSLR quality but want something in a much smaller package than this is the camera to get. Just don’t expect it to fit in your pocket. The price of the camera with the kit lens is actually pretty good in Kuwait. The local dealer is selling it for KD449 which is not far off from Amazon who are selling it for KD418 without tax and shipping. The Zeiss lens on the other hand which is the must have lens for this camera sadly costs KD515. It’s still not available on Amazon yet although they have a pre-order price of around KD340 without tax and shipping. Even at the Amazon price it’s not easy to dish out a price of a camera on a lens. The most expensive lens I’ve personally purchased is the Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 for KD200 and that was second hand and it’s really a huge lens with lots of glass. KD340 for a prime lens? Not sure I’d have the courage to pay that.

If you’re interested in checking the camera out Sony have it on display at their Avenues branch although I picked up the review unit from their new branch at Tilal Complex. The next two cameras I’m trying to get my hands on are the Sony RX100 as well as the Olympus OM-D.

Back in December I posted about the Sulaibikhat beach cleanup which was done by K’s PATH in which they manually collected approximately 2 tonnes of waste in 4 hours. Along with that post I posted a shot of the beach before the cleanup and one after. Well they now have another shot of the same beach taken 6 months after the cleanup and as you will see below, the mangrove stretch, which was layered with plastic and styrofoam waste is now supporting new life.

Our 65th beach clean-up today at Sulaibikhat beach 1 (dubbed by volunteers as Kuwait’s ‘mangrove’ beach) proved to be a momentous day for K’S PATH and Al Yaal’s year-old sustained marine conservation program. Despite the rising summer heat, a fresh stretch of new vegetation was spotted flourishing along the mangroves today. This stretch was cleared of over 2000 kgs waste, mostly styrofoam and plastic, in December 2011 by 25 volunteers and students of AIS in 4 hours. Ever since, our team worked tirelessly to clear smaller waste and debris from top soil. Spring 2012 saw the first signs of growth – green saplings sprouting from soil which was, presumably for years, layered by a blanket of waste unable to support life. A big thank you to all volunteers who have worked relentlessly to protect this stretch of Sulaibikhat since the launch of the program in April 2011! We have much work yet to do, both in clearing waste from lower layers of soil and beneath mangrove branches. [FaceBook]

Earlier today I was told that Habchi and Chalhoub are currently in negotiations with Abercrombie & Fitch to bring them to the region. The Chalhoub Group already have a bunch of popular brands in their roster including Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lacoste, Celine and Marc Jacobs so it would be realistic for them to get the brand although I always imagined Alshaya bringing them. I’m actually interested to see how the brand will adapt to the region but my guess is there won’t be much of an issue. For now I’ll leave you with the video above of the A&F guys lipdubbing “Call Me Maybe” while I go do a thousand sit-ups and starve myself. [YouTube]