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A Japanese Pop Culture Festival will be held at the National Library of Kuwait on September 12 and 13 in corporation with the Ministry of Youth Affairs and the Japanese Embassy. The Festival will include various events, among them will be a Shadowloo Showdown qualifier, Anime drawing contest, figure drawing contest and a cosplay contest.

Date: Thursday September 12 and Friday September 13, 2013
Time: 6PM
Location: National Library of Kuwait

Shadowloo Showdown includes the following games: Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition ver. 2012, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, King of Fighters XIII. To sign up to it or for more information on this festival visit this [Link]

via 360dewan

1- Caribbean Hut Restaurant
2- Tatami
3- Mais Alghanim
4- Al Boom Steak and Seafood
5- Edo
6- The Chocolate Bar
7- Fish Market
8- Solo Pizza Napolitana
9- Maki
10- Slider Station

That top 10 list is based on Trip Advisor and even though I don’t think I agree with it, I’m having trouble putting together my top 5 list yet alone top 10. My #1 would be Open Flame Kitchen but after that things get blurry. Whats your top 5 list?

The future is here (if you ignore the 90s style clipart) [Link]

This is an hour long BBC documentary about the 1991 Gulf War presented by father and son historians Peter and Dan Snow. [YouTube]

A whole bunch of new restaurants are opening up in Jabriya soon. The complex above is near Starbucks and will have iHop, Shake Shack and possibily a third brand as well.

The second complex above is near Champions and will have Johnny Rockets, Nino’s and Caribou Coffee.

Finally there is another new complex opening right across from The Early Bird but no clue yet to what restaurants it will contain. One things for sure, traffic in and around Jabriya is already unbearable and these new restaurants are only going to increase it.

Thanks Patrick

Last week I was craving Chinese food so I headed with a friend to Oliversan in Burj Jassim. Oliversan is the new Asian restaurant owned by the same owners as Maki. On any other day I would have visited Caesars or China Kitchen, my two favorite Chinese restaurants, but that evening I felt like going to a “nicer” place and until Peacock reopens, Oliversan is the only alternative.

The interior looks nice and cozy but like most restaurants during Ramadan, it was empty when we arrived. We were given the menu and I started looking for sweet and sour chicken (my favorite dish) which turns out they didn’t have. That was a good thing since it allowed me to try something new which wasn’t hard to do since their whole menu was full of dishes I hadn’t heard of before. We ended up ordering the following:

Velvety Creamy Chicken Corn Soup KD1.5
Spicy Garlic Sweet Snap Peas KD2.5
Oliversan Duck Salad KD4.5
Sweet and Sour Ostrich Fillet KD5
Braised Short Ribs with Oolong Tea Leaves KD6.5
Regular Oliversan Fried Rice KD2.5

The soup arrived first. I generally wouldn’t order cream of chicken soup at a Chinese restaurant but they only had three soups on the menu and I felt like soup that night. Glad I did because the soup was actually the least disappointing thing I had that night. The Spicy Garlic Sweet Snap Peas came once the soup was done along with the Duck Salad. I wasn’t too impressed with the Duck Salad, not for that price point at least since I didn’t think there was enough duck in it. The dressing was good though and it was a pretty light starter along with the snap peas which left lots of room for the main course.

Once we were done with our starters the waiter brought us our main dishes. The food presentation looked great specially the sweet and sour ostrich. Taste wise my friend liked both dishes but I personally didn’t. I thought the sweet and sour ostrich was the better of the two dishes but it was slightly bland. The meat was surprisingly tender and had good flavor, its just the sweet and sour sauce that let it down. The braised short ribs I had high hopes for but I didn’t end up liking it at all. I thought it was too dry and it should have been served a lot hotter. My guess is since they’re still in a soft launch phase the menu is still being fine tuned which is why I left them this same feedback before I left.

The service was great but since we were alone in the restaurant I wouldn’t have expected anything less. One thing that I found odd was the food plates. The main courses were served in huge plates while our dinner plates were tiny (similar in size to the bread and butter plates). I found it very unpractical eating out of a small plate since I could barely fit a bit of rice with two pieces of ostrich without food starting to spill out of the plate.

In the end I wasn’t too impressed. Maybe I should have gone for the Spicy Chicken with Box Choy or the Mongolian Ostrich with Thai Basil since those two dishes were the other ones I was considering. Anyway if you’re interested in trying them out they’re located in Burj Jassim and their phone number is 22901051.

[Menu Shot 1] [Menu Shot 2]

Note: Interior shot taken from their website

It’s about time.

Thanks Patrick

Oliversan is a new Asian cuisine restaurant that has opened up in Burj Jassim Tower in Kuwait City. The concept belongs to the same owners as Maki and right now they’re in their soft launch phase opening in the evening from 7 t 11PM.

They serve mostly Chinese and Thai food and they’re located on the mezzanine floor. I haven’t tried them out yet since I just found out about the place and they were still closed when I was there.

Why do we have three different security checks at the Kuwait Airport? You have the baggage security check before the check-in counters, you then have one before the emigration counters and finally a third one before entering your departure gate. Can’t they all be combined into one proper security check like most airports? I think at least the one before the check-in counter should be scrapped since in the summer at peak travel season the lines it generates is just ridiculous. From the three security checks that one is the least strict.

In case you missed the Red Bull 5 Pics exhibition at 52 Degrees, photographer Alex Dennis Bolado created a virtual tour of the exhibition that took place there a couple of weeks back. Red Bull 5 Pics was a competition in which each photographer using just 5 photographs had to answer the brief “Kuwait through your eyes”. Check out the virtual tour [Here]

Once you’re done with the tour you can check out all the submissions including the winners on the Red Bull website [Here]

Al Jazeera is featuring some great black and white photos of the bidoon community in Kuwait with all the photos taken by award winning photographer, Greg Constantine. Check them out [Here]

The scale model (above) of the Kuwait Cultural Centre (rendering below) is currently being exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts for the summer. From all the projects that are currently being worked on this is the one I am most excited about. I just love the design.

Check out the scale model [Here]
Check out more info and renderings [Here] and [Here]

This past long weekend I spent it in Lebanon and among the activities I did the most fun was an ATV road trip adventure. I didn’t really know what to expect, I had just previously heard off a friend that you can take an ATV trip with a guide from the popular ski area Faraya, all the way to the Cedars (a few mountains away) and back. The trip ended up being just unbelievably fun.

Depending on where you stay in Lebanon, getting to Faraya will take you anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour with no traffic. Faraya is a popular destination in the winter since a lot of ski resorts are based there, but in the summer, it’s a popular destination for outdoor activities like offroading, mountain biking, camping and ATV exploration. I had booked a bunch of ATVs for me and my friends before arriving to Lebanon and because we wanted to start the day early we got to the starting location in Faraya at around 9:30AM. From there we got geared up, given basic safety tips and the chance to try out the ATVs before heading out on our trip.

The trip is 80% off road with the rest of the time being tiny tarmac roads. It was an incredibly fun journey full of beautiful scenery and general seclusion with no people for miles and miles away. The route heading out was different than the route coming back so that way we didn’t get to experience the same scenery twice. We weren’t expecting the weather to be cold so we didn’t get jackets but our guide recommended we got some since we would be going up to the highest peak in Lebanon (around 2,750 meters high). Luckily we found a small store near the starting point that rented out ski jackets and good thing we got them because with the jackets on we were still freezing our asses off in some stages of the trip.

The journey in each direction took around 3 hours and we past through a variety of different environments and terrain. We were constantly putting on and taking off our jackets and the road surface would change from rocks to dirt and to sand as we went up and down different peaks and valleys. Our destination was a small restaurant in the middle of nowhere next to a beautiful lake. Once we were done with lunch we headed back to our starting point but this time on a different route and an extremely beautiful one filled with green fields, lots of hills and a dirt trail (a lot more comfortable than a rocky one).

The total journey with lunch lasted just over 7 hours but time really flew by quickly and I even wished it had lasted longer. There were a lot of interesting things we got to see along the way as well. At one point I thought I was going to get kidnapped when a man on the side of the road walked towards me with an M4A1 Carbine Assault Rifle as I drove by. Luckily turned out he was after something/someone on the other side of the road and not me. We also got to drive through huge (and I mean HUGE) cannabis fields where at one point a dodgy looking lifted pickup truck filled with men tried to stop us as well. Our guide had also told us we would be driving through snow walls as high as 6 meters. Of course none of us had believed him since we were in June so you could imagine our surprise when we did end up surrounded by 6 meter snow walls at one point of the trip.

This was an incredibly fun adventure and one I really can’t wait to go on again. Since we were four people the cost for the trip was $225 per person (guide included). If you’re less than four it’s $250 and if you’re more than four you could probably negotiate a better price. You could also share an ATV with someone else since it can hold two people and that way split the amount. But I have to say it was EXTREMELY worth $225. Make sure if you do take this trip to expect to end up covered in dust and dirt. Also bring a jacket with you as well. We rented the ATVs with the guide from a place called Red Runner. Their phone number is +9613178866. Have fun!

The Kuwaiti criminal court sentenced on Sunday four suspects to death for killing a Lebanese doctor with a cleaver in December last year.

Samir Yousef Jaber, 26, a Lebanese dentist born of a Kuwaiti mother, was repeatedly stabbed with the cleaver following a disagreement with the four young men at Avenues Mall.

It seems all four individuals involved in the murder will be getting the same sentence. [Link]

I was in Beirut over the weekend and on this trip I ended up staying at the Four Seasons Hotel in Downtown Beirut. The hotel is located in what I think is one of the nicest looking towers in Beirut, right in front of the very popular Zaituna Bay and so I was really looking forward to staying there.

Right from the moment I stepped out of my rental I knew I was going to be enjoying my stay at the hotel. The customer service at the hotel was just better then any other I had previously stayed in before and I’ve stayed at many. The feeling I kept getting is that every single employee wanted to help make your stay better, and by every single employee I don’t mean just the reception staff or managers, I mean everyone from the valet guys, to the housekeepers to the waiters. I think its the words they use but you just get this feeling that you can ask them for whatever you want and they’d love to do it and that made me super comfortable in asking them for stuff which I tend not to do.

Other than the excellent service my room was also very comfortable. I had overpacked on this trip but there was more than enough closest space and drawers to accomodate all my stuff. The room wasn’t that big but the bathroom was with a large sink area, tub, shower room, toilet room and a makeup table. The room had a balcony that was big enough to fit a table and two chairs and finally there was free wifi in the room and the whole hotel. My favorite part of the hotel though would have to be the roof. During the day the roof is a cool place to swim and tan but at night it’s an open air lounge overlooking the Mediterranean sea and Beirut.

I do have two minor complaints though. The first issue the hotel really can’t do much about but the view from my room could have been better if there wasn’t a large sand lot right outside. I live in Kuwait so I would rather not see sand lots when I travel. Even though the hotel is right in front of Zaituna Bay, my room was more on the side and I could only see the marina if I was on the balcony looking left which was disappointing. The other issue I had was with their breakfast. It’s not a breakfast buffet and one of the things I look forward to the most in hotels is their breakfast buffets. At the Four Seasons they have a dried fruit, fresh fruit and cereal buffet but if you want any hot dishes you have to order them. The advantage obviously is your breakfast is made for you and so is fresh, but the disadvantage is it takes time to make and you also can’t just fill up your plate with whatever looks good like you would do at a regular buffet.

In the end though I had a really good time at the hotel. I generally don’t tend to spend much time at hotels but on this trip I was having all my friends come over so we could just chill out on the roof. The incredibly friendly service and the lounge on the roof made me really love my stay. I’d most likely stay there again once I’m done reviewing other hotels in Beirut.

Here is the link to their [Website]