Here There and Everywhere

Of Little or No Interest to Most People

I began this blog in 2006, living in Kuwait. Kuwait was resource-rich for blogging; lots of bloggers, all kinds of interests; as a new resident in Kuwait, it gave me a portal into a new world, a new way of seeing things, and a way to meet wonderful people I might otherwise have never encountered. Kuwait was also rich in ex-pats, people from all over the world came to Kuwait to work, to send money home to their families, to create a better life. Many of those stories are in previous entries.

One story in particular still makes me laugh. I was at a dinner party at the British Embassy, seated next to a Nigerian woman. “So how did you come to live in Kuwait?” I asked, as I always do, because the answers are always so varied and unexpected.

She said she came to work with her husband. She leaned in and said in a low voice “I look deep inside you and tell you things you never knew about yourself.”

I’m pretty good at keeping a polite face, but I think I slipped a little then as I looked at this very respectable woman and thought “Witchcraft??” “Psychologist?” And she laughed, and said “I’m a radiologist.” We became good friends. I loved her sense of humor and her love of life.

There was a lot to write about, so many things that were new and unusual and often lovely. Before I left Kuwait, my blog had more than a million hits. Before I left Doha, I had more than two million. That was 16 years ago, and blogging has diminished, I no longer live such an exotic and interesting life and I have less time to write. The blog has struggled on.

This morning, I noticed I am about to hit 2,900,000 hits. Maybe this week. That’s fun for me. And it makes me wonder if I will live long enough, write long enough, to hit 3 million.

March 15, 2026 - Posted by intlxpatr | Adventure, Blogging, Circle of Life and Death, Statistics, WordPress