Qatteri Cat Gets Bored
The Qatteri Cat remembers what it was like to live on the streets. He doesn’t remember the hunger, the thirst or the danger. What he remembers are the smells, and the great adventure.
When he first came to live with us, he often escaped. He could run out the back, up a tree and once over the wall, he was GONE. He always came back . . . unless, of course, he was stuck in someone’s back yard, or up a tree so tall he couldn’t figure out how to get down. We always knew when that happened – we could hear him yowling all the way home.
But now, he can’t get out. There are days when he yearns for the street, for the smells and strangeness of the great outdoors. We try to amuse him, and he humors us.
We hid one of his “babies” under the sack. It’s driving him crazy:
He pushes the sack, trying to get his baby:
Finally, he wins!
777
This week I saw an accident, and called 777. My experience was very positive – my call was answered on the first try, and although the lady didn’t speak English, we managed. The ambulance people called me, the police called me multiple times, the ambulance showed up, the police showed up. All in all, not bad.
It would have been better had I spoken better Arabic, but we all managed. One guy put me on the speaker phone and had everyone listen to me and then someone said what I was saying. It was one of those Woh is der Bahnhof experiences where they would keep asking me “Where? Where?” and I would tell them and tell them, and then they would say “”Oh! You are saying . . . ” and it would be EXACTLY what I had been saying! Exactly!
But I could also hear them smiling as they talked to me, and I was glad I knew a few words. I probably sound like a four year old, but a four year old with enough sense to make a much-needed call and get the police and ambulance where they are needed, al hamdullah!
Oxo Salad Spinner
The first time I ever used the Oxo Salad Spinner in Kuwait, I became a fan. Do you ever buy the Kuwaiti Salad Greens at the Sultan Market? I hope you wash them before you use them!
The Oxo Salad Spinner has three parts; an outer bowl, and inner bowl like a seive, and a top that you press on and it makes the inner bowl spin very very fast inside the outer bowl, and the centripetal force makes all the water fly off the leaves and fall to the bottom of the bowl. So you can just lift out the inner bowl and empty the water out.
No electricity needed, it is entirely mechanical, and so well engineered that the bowl will spin on and on and on unless you stop it.
Before I spin the salad, I put all the salad greens in the inner bowl, put the inner bowl in the outer bowl and run cold water over the greens until the bowl is full. I leave it a couple minutes, then pull the inner bowl out, and empty the water from the outer bowl. The water is BROWN with dirt! I put the inner bowl in the outer bowl and rinse again, and again, until the water comes clear. Then, and only then, do I spin the lettuce/greens dry.
After emptying the spin-off water, I can actually put the spinner in the refrigerator, with the greens inside, or I can transfer them to another bowl or sack. They don’t last too long in our salad-eating house.
This is what the Oxo Salad Spinner looks like:
The part sticking out can be locked in the down position for storage. There is also a button that stops the salad spinner’s spinning motion, otherwise it takes a long time for the spinner to slow and stop.
If you are a reader who does not live in Kuwait, but who buys from local markets or farmer’s markets, you will still find this honey incredibly handy.
You can find the salad spinner by Oxo at Amazon.com for $24.95 plus shipping.
“Make This Case Go Away”
This is from today’s Kuwait Times.
MP Intervenes to save rapists
by Hanan Al-Saadoun
Kuwait: Two men accused of kidnap, rape and assault were let off the hook after pressure from a lawmaker and a senior police officer. A captain from the Traffic Department was on duty in Khaitan when he saw a parked car with an Asian maid in it and a man standing next to the car. The maid suddenly pointed to the officer and cried for help, so the captain rushed to the car and found another man inside with the maid.
The captain asked the man outside what the problem was. The main replied that this was a runaway maid and he was a detective. The captain asked for his ID but the man refused. The captain then realized that the man smelled of alcohol.
The men suddenly assaulted the captain and bit his hand, injuring him severely (emphasis added by blogger.) After the captain subdued both men, they confessed that they were drunk and that they had tried to rape the maid. The captain then tried to file a case at the Khaitan police station against the two men, but the MP intervened and tried to stop the captain from registering the case. The captain persisted and kept pushing to file a case for a week, until his superior intervened too and told him to “forget the incident.”
My comment: If I ever stop getting outraged when I read reports like this, God forbid, I will be dead.
First, the maid’s life is seriously damaged. Any victim can tell you that the terror of abduction, with or without rape, resonates through your life. When you are in a situation where you have no power, and are at the mercy of someone stronger or more powerful than you are, it is a life-changing event. And would her sponsor accept her back, even though it were no fault of her own? Would they not be afraid she might be diseased? They might even accuse her of inviting the assault – and this was an assault.
Second, these young men lied to the police, impersonated a police officer, resisted arrest and caused bodily harm to a senior police official. Did you notice – THEY CONFESSED.
Third, the police captain had the guts and integrity to persue filing this case against these wicked young men, inspite of pressures from above. WOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOO on you, brave one, for your integrity.
Last, kudos for Hanan al-Sadoun who does such a great job presenting so many of these outrageous stories in an objective manner, letting us fill in the details and express our outrage in our blogs. Brava, habeebti.
Evidently this air tight case will never get to court.
And what have these young men learned about accountability? That their name and wasta will make their despicable actions go away? What is the fitting punishment for what they have done? C’mon readers, check in on this one.
OK, OK, I’ll take a deep breath and stop now.
The Best Tomato Salad
The best tomato salad starts with my friends’ home-garden-grown Kuwaiti tomatoes, little tiny cherry ones, that we cut in half. We mix up some of the best olive oil and balsamic vinegar, we cut some fresh basil leaves from their garden and chop them and throw them in.
Then we add cubes of this:
We grind fresh salt and fresh pepper, add the dressing, and oh! It is almost a meal in itself. Perfect with “sheem” and rice and zucchini. Coffee in the garden, while the nights are still so moderate and pleasant.
If there is someone making fresh mozarella in Kuwait, I haven’t been able to find him/her. This is about as close as I have been able to come. It is horrifyingly expensive, and worth every fil. You find it at the Sultan Center, in the dairy section.
My Addiction
Even though I know it is hopeless, I always look. It’s never there, or only once in the entire time I have lived here, and that was at the BIG Sultan Store in Salmiyya. But without any real hope, I looked and there it was!
When I was a kid growing up in Germany, there was something called PX rules. PX means Post Exchange, it is the place where American military people, or state department, or Canadians or British peoples would shop for things that the local German economy didn’t carry. The first rule is “if you see it, buy it.” The second rule is “if you see it and like it, buy several, as you may never see it again.”
So I bought all four bottles:
Even knowing that this behavior is known as “hoarding” and that hoarding leads to shortages and that is probably why I see it so rarely, and knowing I should leave a bottle or two for someone else . . . knowing all that, I still bought all four bottles. I couldn’t help it. I’ve been conditioned. The rules are too strong; I can’t resist.
When I first go back to the US, and see it plentifully on the grocery store shelves, it is still hard to just buy one . . . except that there, you can even buy a litre size, and that usually lasts me a week or so.
Vanilla Caramel . . . ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh . . .
ATV Man
Why would a grown man – this guy must’ve been in his 40’s – drive an ATV to the Sultan Center?
Senior Citizens in Kuwait Taking Hospital Beds?
Tacked on to another article in yesterday’s Kuwait Times was this tiny bit of news, with much larger social implications:
“In other news, sources revealed that senior citizens have changed the rooms of public hospitals into old aged homes due to the low fees that are imposed on reserving a room at the hospital.
The rooms at public hospitals are worth KD 1 per day, and if the patient stays for two months, then he will pay only 500 fils per day.
Effective measures must be adopted by the Ministry of Health such as giving a determined time for each patient in order to enable hospitals to receive other patients.”
In a related article several months ago, a article in the same newspaper said that the hospitals were overrun with old people because people couldn’t take care of them at home, and it was much less shameful to say “my Mother is in the hospital” than to say “my mother is in a home for old people.”
It sounds to me like the solution is for the Kuwait government to open a state of the art “hospital” specializing in Gerontology, which in reality would be a retirement center for people unable to take care of their own physical needs, and whose families cannot meet their needs (believe me, after my father’s lengthy and debilitating illness, I know there is only so much a family can do), and they can still say that their parent(s) are in a hospital.
It would meet the need of “hospitalization,” would provide the older people with the intensive and personal services that they need, and would free the beds in traditional hospitals for the seriously ill and damaged citizens.
It’s only words.
Kuwait conference calls for document on women rights
In yesterday’s Kuwait Times, there was a tiny paragraph in the reporting about Personal Law in Kuwait pertaining to women that stated
“Among the loopholes of that must be corrected is the provision empowering a woman’s father to marry her to whoever he likes or divorce her without consulting or even informing her . . . “
Is this possible? Does this still happen? I thought in Islam, a woman had to agree to accept a man as husband, and had a right to have clauses put into her marriage contract? And a father can have his daughter divorced from her husband without her even knowing about it, much less agreeing to it?
Here is today’s reporting from the Kuwait Times on the recommendations for legal changes:
KUWAIT: Participants in the Conference on the “Kuwaiti Women in National Legislations” have recommended the preparation of a comprehensive national document to facilitate women participation in the country’s development aspects under the sponsorship of the legislative and executive authorities as well as the civic society institutions.
At the conclusion of the one-day conference, organised by the National Assembly’s women affairs committee, the participants demanded improvement of legislative performance, promotion of the existing legislations and completion of the legal system in an introduction for the rise of women’s rights in the society.
To read the rest of the article, with the recommendations made by the committee, click on Kuwait Times, here.
The Kuwait Left Turn
I actually first came across the first left turn in Saudi Arabia, and would watch in horrified fascination at the stoplights. Saudi Arabian driving was the worst I have seen, ever, anywhere in the world, but the driving has some inner logic if you are there long enough to get used to it. (I had thought I would hate not driving, but in Saudi Arabia, I was happy not to drive.)
In Saudi Arabia, there was no respect for lanes at all. At a junction there might be four legal lanes; one marked for people turning left, one for people turning right, and two for going straight ahead, but when the light turned red, there would be six or seven or eight cars lined up, all squeezed together, almost door to door. If there is a space, a car will fill it.
And maybe four or five of those cars would turn left, but not necessarily the four cars closest to the left. One might be in the far right turn lane, but going left. Yes, there were accidents, but not so often as you would think.
In Kuwait, they have refined the right-turn-lane-left-turn down to an art. I’ve gotten so used to it I hardly notice it any more, and that is why I am blogging about it now, so I will have it down before it falls of the screen.
Here is how it works. The guy in the far right lane realizes he needs to turn left. First move – he turns the wheels left and inches forward. Second step – this is optional – he gets the attention of the guy to his left and indicates he needs to go left. This is done with a combination of desperate looking eyes and a hand motion. Third step – he continues inching forward. Last step – just as the light is about to change/is changing he shoots out into the intersection, across four lanes of traffic, making his left turn.
There’s no honking. People are used to it.
That the lane second to the left also often goes left, although it is marked to go straight ahead, is a given.
It happens so often, we take it for granted.
The second variation on a left turn is that in Kuwait there are long stretches between stoplights or roundabouts, but there are conveniently marked areas where you can make a u-turn. There are left turn lanes that make it easy. But often, there are people who don’t want to get in line, or maybe realize too late that this is where they need to turn. No problem. They just get right up next to you and start edging their way in. It can be really scary when that someone is a big cement truck, or a bus full of workers.
Sometimes there can be two or three cars making that left turn at the same time. You would think it would be a disaster, and somehow, it all seems to work.
All this is . . . . very creative, refusing to be limited to what the law says is permissible. The problem becomes switching tracks when you go back to a country where the laws are less flexible.
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