Kuwait Skyline (1)
Kuwait in the 1970’s was called the Paris of the Gulf. People who lived here then talk about it with great nostalgia, they call it paradise. Kuwait was an old trading city, full of merchants and traders. Kuwaiti men went out on fishing boats, and pearling boats, and the love of the sea is still deep in the Kuwaiti soul. The women were strong and adventurous, and took care of all the family business while the men were out to sea.
Kuwait had a tradition of tolerance and sophistication found nowhere else in the Gulf.
So many changes since then, and so much building since the capture of Saddam Hussein. I will try to post photos of some of the changes for distant viewers:
An old favorite:
Changing skyline:
Kuwait Cool Spell
When I checked Weather Underground this morning for Kuwait, I learned we are going through a little dip in the temperatures. From the damp, excruciatingly humid heat we have been having, the dry weather has returned.
And today, a cool spell. The anticipated high today will only be 111 degrees F. (44 degrees C.), but tomorrow it will go back up to 116° F. (47° C) and Wednesday it will be 118°F (48° C). Thought those of you suffering “heat” in the US might enjoy the comparison. 😦
The heat is dry, though. When you go out, you reall really need to have water with you; you lose water through evaporation, and often, you don’t even sweat, it just evaporates right off you.
Here are signs of dehydration:
The following are the most common symptoms of dehydration, although each individual may experience symptoms differently. Symptoms may include:
thirst
less-frequent urination
dry skin
fatigue
light-headedness
dizziness
confusion
dry mouth and mucous membranes
increased heart rate and breathing
In children, additional symptoms may include:
dry mouth and tongue
no tears when crying
no wet diapers for more than 3 hours
sunken abdomen, eyes or cheeks
high fever
listlessness
irritability
skin that does not flatten when pinched and released
This is from The University of Maryland Medical Center website.
In Kuwait, and other Gulf countries, religious individuals, mosques and cities provide drinking and washing water as a courtesy to the public. You will find water stations everywhere, and people filling up their bottles for drinking later or drinking from a tin cup attatched to the sabille by a chain. They come in all shapes and sizes. When we spot a new shape, we try to get a photo. This one is a very common shape:
Appetizer Puffs
These little bite sized morsels are just cream puffs made small. When you take them out of the oven, you cut the tops off as soon as you can touch them, and pull out the dough pieces inside. When cool, and just before serving, you fill them with savory mixtures:
• grated Gouda cheese mixed with port wine and a little cream cheese
• chopped shrimp mixed with a little chopped celery and mayonnaise
• chopped ham and a tiny bit of mustard and mayonnaise
• crabmeat with a tiny bit of mayonnaise
• chopped up crisp bacon with a little horseradish and mayonnaise
• grated cheddar with finely chopped pimentos and a little mayonnaise
• chopped clams with sour cream
• Chopped and drained tomato, with tiny mozzarella and chopped basil
• Kuwait: flaked, cooked hammour w/tiny bit of sour cream and a little bit of “Kuwaiti spices”
• flaked, cooked tuna with a little aioli mayonnaise and cilantro
. . . . . use your own favorite combinations!
1 cup water
1/2 cup butter
1 cup flour
4 eggs
Heat oven to 400 degrees. Heat water and butter to strong rolling boil. Stir in flour, stir vigorously over low heat about one minute or until mixture forms a ball. (You’ll know it when you see it.)
Remove from heat, beat in eggs, one at a time, continue beating and beating until smooth. Drop dough by tiny spoonfulls 2” apart onto UNGREASED baking sheet. Bake 35 – 40 minutes or until puffed and golden. Cool away from drafts. Cut off tops, pull out filaments of dough.
Fill just before serving so they don’t get soggy. Remember to put the top back on! These are easy to make, easy to serve and even fun to make with children.
Additional options: You can also make these sweet, filling with Creme Chantilly (whip up cream, add a little SIFTED [yes, it matters] powdered sugar and a little vanilla) and still serve by fingers, or you can pour a little chocolate sauce over the top and serve in a bunch of three or four on a plate as profiteroles. The blessing of these puffs is their versatility!
Photo from all recipes.com
Marriage – A Great Adventure
I remember the day we looked at each other in astonishment, the day we realized we had lived with each other longer than we had lived with our own parents. We think of family cultures as the culture we grew up in, but in our years together, we have created our own family culture, haven’t we?
We chose one another, in itself, a great adventure. We chose a life full of change and risk. We stacked the obstacles against our survival as a couple, and yet we prevailed, by the grace of God.
We laugh at how young we were to have made such a lifelong commitment. We laugh at how we walked into parenthood – no, RAN into parenthood, joyfully, with no clues as to the huge responsibilities, the agonies as well as the intense delights.
Happy Anniversary, Adventure Man. I thank God for our marriage, and our partnership.
These are for you.
Morning in the bush
Picnic Stop
The thrill of the chase
The Great Migration
Zanzibar
GoogleEarth – Make Your Own Maps
You, too, can make your own maps, and get where you need to go, thanks to GoogleEarth. If you are a landmark driver, like me, this will make your day.
A friend gave me a map to her house that blew my mind – it was a GoogleEarth map, with lines and arrows and landmarks – everything I need when I am driving. I could see the roundabouts! I could see the major landmarks! I knew EXACTLY where to turn, which mosque where I would turn right, and which field to drive across.
She said her husband had done it; she didn’t know how. I opened GoogleEarth and figured it out. Now – oh my! I have maps to everywhere! It is so totally cool!
You open Google, find EXACTLY the image you need to use for your map (be sure your major landmarks are in the frame) and you go to File on the toolbar and scroll down to Save – there is an arrow, and you choose Save Image.
You open your drawing program – in my case, Appleworks, but it will work with your drawing program, too.
You paste your map into your drawing program, and then you add your arrows showing the route to take, and you add text identifying the landmarks, and perhaps writing out the directions.
And then you print. It’s that easy. And holy smokes, the maps are totally usable.
Parking Wall of Shame
At the Al Manshar Mall, where there are only about forty spaces for a huge mall:
Emergency Lane Rant
It’s not your arrogance that drives me totally crazy, as much as the fact that your arrogance puts us all at risk.
First, you are driving too fast, and weaving between cars. Yep, it looks like fun, but you’re cutting it a little close, brother. And if you are young and have all your wits about you, you might do OK, but if you are tired, if you are drinking, if you are on drugs, your reactions are impaired and so is your judgement.
We can’t help but bear witness to your carnage along the sides of the road. It’s not like they sit there for weeks. The tow trucks haul them away, and they are replaced overnight with new, bloodier, twisted wreckage. The highways are littered with your crumpled bumpers, and shards of your shattered windshields.
Worse, as traffic piles up, and ambulances arrive to try to save those who survive the impact, no-one moves aside! When time is critical, when seconds can literally mean life or death, the ambulances are stuck trying to get past cars which won’t move out of the way.
As for the rest of us, stacked up along the highways, waiting for the wreckage to be cleared, it doesn’t help to have these drivers zipping by in the EMERGENCY lanes. Hello???? What part of EMERGENCY is so hard for you to understand?
You’re not special. We all have places we need to be. And – you are in the emergency lane. You endanger us all.
Google Street View Peeping?
I found this article on AOL, but it is from the New York Times originally.
Google Zooms In Too Close for Some
By MIGUEL HELFT, The New York Times
The New York Times
OAKLAND, Calif. (June 2) – For Mary Kalin-Casey, it was never about her cat.
Google said it takes privacy seriously and considered the implications of its service before it was introduced. “Street View only features imagery taken on public property,” it said.
Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View. She typed in her address and the screen showed a street-level view of her building. As she zoomed in, she could see Monty, her cat, sitting on a perch in the living room window of her second-floor apartment.
“The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people’s lives,” Ms. Kalin-Casey said in an interview Thursday on the front steps of the building. “The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged.”
Her husband quickly added, “It’s like peeping.”
Ms. Kalin-Casey first shared her concerns about the service in an e-mail message to the blog Boing Boing on Wednesday. Since then, the Web has been buzzing about the privacy implications of Street View — with varying degrees of seriousness. Several sites have been asking users to submit interesting images captured by the Google service, which offers panoramic views of miles of streets around San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.
On a Wired magazine blog, for instance, readers can vote on the “Best Urban Images” that others find in Street View. On Thursday afternoon, a picture of two young women sunbathing in their bikinis on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Calif., ranked near the top. Another showed a man scaling the front gate of an apartment building in San Francisco. The caption read, “Is he breaking in or has he just locked himself out?”
Google said in a statement that it takes privacy seriously and considered the privacy implications of its service before it was introduced on Tuesday. “Street View only features imagery taken on public property,” the company said. “This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.”
You can read the rest of the article on AOL MOney News by clicking here.
My comment: I am a huge fan of transparency, so you might think this new ability wouldn’t bother me. But the transparency I favor is transparency of business and government transactions, not people taking in my behavior in my own house! I am also a huge fan of personal privacy, and while a street view that just shows my cat in the window wouldn’t be alarming, it tells me that photos shot at night, which would show the interior of my residence, are also possible, and that thought troubles me very much.
Our homes are our castles! If my husband wants to walk around in his underwear (or less 😉 ) and I want to wear my nightgown all day when I am working on a special project, honestly, it is not YOUR business, nor anyone else on the internet! Do you want photos published, taken of you unaware in your own house? This capability is terrifying!
Widad Kawar’s Passion
Many years ago, in another life, I was honored to visit the collection of Widad Kawar in Amman, Jordan. I was so young, and so completely in awe of Widad, who had made it a life mission to collect traditional clothing of the area, Palestinian, which was her own heritage, and nomadic.
It was like being a little girl and getting to play dress up as we oooohed and aahhhed over these gorgeous old dresses and head dresses. I had no idea she had become an institution, until I began to research a style of hijab I had seen there which I found very elegant.
LIttle Diamond, these are for you. They are from several sources, including The Arab Heritage site on Widad Kawar which I urge you to peruse when you have a spare hour or half a day or . . . a lifetime. She has created a monumental body of work with her passion for preserving these fabulous textiles.
From Widad Kawar’s collection: North Jordan
Shows a little of the glitz – this one is from Salt, photo from Widad Kawar’s collection:
I love this photo. The woman has a plain version of the headdress, and is wearing a double dress . . . and her husband is holding her hand!
Blog Complaints
My family and friends outside Kuwait tell me I don’t publish enough Kuwait photos. These two are for you, and I will try to work on this. 😉 These are from a recent trip to the Al Kout mall in Fehaheel, just south of Kuwait.
Ladies leaving the Al Kout Mall
I think this mosque is one of the most beautiful I have seen:
Is this not one of the most beautiful Starbucks you have seen? It sits on overlooking a small marina. Greetings to all my Seattle friends.
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