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Cookbooks are a pleasure to have, use, and gift to others, and recently our team has been obsessed with “Palestine on a Plate – Memories from my Mother’s Kitchen by Joudie Kalla”. It’s our September PantryBee Bookclub of the month choice for millions of reasons, all of them delicious.

Palestinian-Briti Joudie Kalla is a caterer and a restaurateur in London with a Middle Eastern restaurant in Chelsea named Baity. Her cookbook is filled with classic Palestinian recipes that have been passed down to her from her grandmother and family, and like all great Arabic cooking it caters to carnivores and plant based eaters alike. Our favorite picks include: Sayadeyeh, Salatet jaj wa freekeh, kubbeh bil sanniyeh, Teta Huda’s mussaka and last but not least mejdool date scones.

If you want to hear a bit more, watch the quick interview with Joudie above.

You can order the book [Here]
Or get the Palestine on a Plate app for your phone from [Here]

Post by Hind
CoFounder of PantryBee where home cooking is made easy.

No surprise here but Kuwait is still one of the worst countries for expats according to the latest Expat Insider survey by Internations. Kuwait came in 64th place out of a total of 65 countries surveyed. On the bright side, at least we’re not in last place like we were last year.

Kuwait has improved by one place, coming 64th out of 65 countries in 2017. In fact, it’s improved by at least one place in all indices, with particular progress in the Working Abroad Index: job security has improved by 15 places, putting Kuwait in the middle of the ranking (32nd). Quality of life still remains a struggle, however, and Kuwait comes last for leisure options and personal happiness.

Surprisingly, Bahrain was voted as the best place in the world for expats. Check out the full result of the survey and rankings [Here]

Thanks Bashar

The Onam Festival is back and will be taking place tomorrow Monday the 4th of September. Onam is the biggest and most important festival of the state of Kerala in India and it’s also celebrated here in Kuwait. A few Southern Indian restaurants in Kuwait offer the traditional vegetarian dish the Onasadya during the festival and below are some of those restaurants.

Caesar’s Dakshin Restaurant – Jeleeb Al-Shuyoukh, Al Jawhara Building
Price: KD3.500
Telephone: 24319191, 24310303 [Map]

Udupi Restaurant – Fahaheel, Green Tower
Price: KD2.250
Telephone: 25456565 [Map]

Saravanaa Bhavan – Fahaheel, Humoud Towers
Price: KD2.500
Telephone: 23929099 [Map]

If you know of any more places serving Onam, let us know in the comments.

Back in November the Ministry of Interior announced that cops were going to start removing the license plates of illegally parked cars. A month later I posted about how impressed I was that the cops were actually still actively remove car plates. Fast forward to today and the cops are still at it. New laws pop up all the time and most of them don’t stick around so its pretty damn impressive that cops are still going around removing car plates, even with the ridiculously hot August weather.

For the past week I haven’t been in the mood to post at all. I’m on vacation and like everyone else who goes on vacation, I want to leave my work behind. But with the blog, its not that simple.

With your normal job you tend to handover your work to another employee and then take off, with the blog I don’t have anyone to hand over the posting to. I also can’t just stop posting, I mean I can if its a short trip but I’m out now for nearly three weeks so I can’t just not post for that long.

Putting that aside I also struggle to find stuff to write about when I’m not in Kuwait. When I first started blogging I used to post about my trip, places I’m checking out, things I recommend other people do and if you’re lucky, you’d catch one of my drunken rants before deleting it. But overtime I just kept getting more and more private. I don’t post about my trips anymore and I barely instagram anything as well. I’ve been to the States 4 times over the past 3 years but nobody except my closest friends knew about them. I did Kentucky, Tennessee, Washington, and Philadelphia on one trip and barely posted two abstract pictures on instagram from my whole stay. I like it that way, I like my privacy.

But I think I’m going to go back to how things were before. I think I’m going to start posting about my trips again since it will give me stuff to write about which in return will reduce my stress when I’m on vacation. I do have a bunch of cool things coming up on my trip so we’ll see how things turn out.

Does anyone know where I can find an OBDII scanner for the car in Kuwait? They cost peanuts on Amazon but figured someone must sell them locally? Preferably a bluetooth one.

OBD stands for on-board diagnostics and is the term referring to the car’s self-diagnostic and reporting capability. If your engine light comes on, you can plug in the OBD scanner and the car will tell you what caused the engine light to come on. The OBD can also give you real time information about your car like car speed, engine temperature, fuel rate etc..

Wataniya Airways is getting close to relaunch and they’ve updated their website with the first three destinations they’ll be flying to which are:

Azerbaijan
Georgia
Sarajevo

If someone had asked me to guess their first ten destinations, neither of these three would have made my list. They seem like such low traffic destinations to be flying to but supposedly they’re popular destinations for conservatives. That’s interesting, and smart.

When Wataniya Airways launched the first time around they were flying to popular destinations like Beirut and Dubai so they were competing with a number of other airlines. This time around it seems they’re trying to carve a niche for themselves and now I’m curious to see what else they’ll be adding.

Here is a link to their [Website]

Thanks Abdullah

According to a recent article in The Telegraph, Kuwait is one of the top 20 fastest growing travel destinations in the world. The article doesn’t mention why or how that came to be, and I also couldn’t find their original source of data, so I don’t really have more more information other than the ranking. Kuwait was also the only Arab country to appear on the list which you can check out below:

The top 20 fastest growing travel destinations
1- Sierra Leone +310%
2- Nepal +39.7%
3- Iceland +39%
4- South Korea +30.3%
5- Moldova +28.6%
6- Chile +26%
7- Vietnam +24.6%
8- Japan +21.8%
9- Liechtenstein +21.7%
10- Kiribati +21.6%
11- Kuwait +20.7%
12- Madagascar +20%
13- Cyprus +19.8%
14- Georgia +19%
15- Turks & Caicos +17.5%
16- Cook Islands +17.1%
17- Slovakia +16.9%
18- Kenya +16.8%
19- Tanzania +15.6%
20- Indonesia +15.5%

For the full article click [Here]

Thanks Hind!

The Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report for 2017 by the World Economic Forum is out and Kuwait pretty much comes in last place in the Middle East with the only other country that performed worst being Yemen. Below is Kuwait’s world ranking compared to other Middle Eastern countries:

29 United Arab Emirates
47 Qatar
60 Bahrain
63 Saudi Arabia
66 Oman
75 Jordan
93 Iran
96 Lebanon
100 Kuwait
136 Yemen

Going through the data I found one thing pretty shocking, under the section “Environmental Sustainability”, Kuwait came in before last position world wide in 135th place. We also were at the bottom of the list when it came to “Cultural Resources and Business Travel”, “Natural Resources”, “International Openness” and “Prioritization of Travel & Tourism”.

The highest position we reached in any category was 31st place for “ICT Readiness” (information and communications technology). In that category Kuwait came first world wide in “Mobile-cellular telephone subscriptions /100 pop.” and third world wide for “Mobile-broadband subscriptions /100 pop”.

If you’re interested in read the whole report you can download it from [Here]

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.

The rendering above is of the new and approved design proposal for the Palace of Justice which was unveiled a few days ago. I think it looks incredible good and I’m so glad they didn’t end up going with a ridiculously tall skyscraper like the new Central Bank building. The project is going to be overseen by the Amiri Diwan which means we can expect it to be completed in the next couple of years.

Thanks ChaoticTranquility!

If you haven’t checked out the “Kuwestions” section on the blog then today might be a good day to do so. Lots of interesting questions there with many helpful answers so you might find out something new or you could even help out by answering a question yourself. Check it out [Here]

Last night I noticed cops removing plates off of a new Bentley SUV that was parked illegally on the street near Little Ruby’s in Kuwait City. Two things impressed me, the first is that they don’t really care what kind of car you have, no matter who you are, if you park illegally you’re losing your plates. The second thing that impressed me was that the cops aren’t just removing plates during the day, they’re doing it at night as well. I love that they’re still very active with this.

For the gamers who are interested in picking up the new NES Classic Edition console, I just got back from Rehab Complex and nobody has it, not even for an exorbitant price. Most of the places I asked didn’t even know what I was talking about even after showing them a picture. One shop did tell me that they might be getting it this Thursday. I gave them my number and they’re going to call me up if they do. Will keep you posted.

Currently sitting on my comfy couch eating my gummy bears while watching people do burpees. Over 400 athletes from 35 countries are taking part in this event right now at Marina Crescent. [YouTube]

Update: Video updated to the Day 2 live stream.
Update2: Event is now over.