10,000 Steps Continued
As you know, I began an exercise program a few weeks ago called 10,000 Steps – you can find out more about it here: 10,000 Steps. I don’t have very good luck with gyms . . . it’s just a waste of money for me; I sign up all enthusiastic, and by the second day at the gym I am already trying to find ways to get out of it. I get bored. Exercise is BORING!
But I love walking. Actually I love water aerobics, too, when there aren’t a bunch of googly-eyed guys watching, and when I have a gaggle of girlfriends to laugh and pass the time with while we exercise and I just don’t have that opportunity in Kuwait.
So I got sick and tired of myself NOT exercising and decided to work on 10,000 steps. I’ve been doing pretty well, too, worked up to running 6,000 steps before I left, and it only takes me about 35 minutes.
The other day I bought a pedometer. Today I put it on for the first time.
You have to understand, when I come back to Seattle, I have THE LIST with me. The list is all the things that are hard to get or impossible to get in Kuwait, or just annoying to have to track down. Occasionally, like this time, I also have things to get for friends. . . just a little thing here and there, but it all goes on THE LIST.
Around noon I called my Mom and said I would be by in about an hour with lunch. When I got there, I remembered I had my pedometer on, and I checked it – I was already at 9,081 steps! By the time I got back to my hotel, it had started over.
I love it. I am tired at the end of each day from running around, my legs even ache and my feet hurt and I love it. Even the hot days – there were two of them, and now it is cloudy and it is going to rain and they just don’t get it at all that I LOVE the rain – the hot days weren’t that bad.
I am going to be in PAIN when I get back to Kuwait and face days of 115°F again! It is 70°F / 21° C in Seattle today.
Fuschia Morning
It doesn’t take much. When Yousef at Some Contrast asked for more fuschia photos . . . honestly, it was just the excuse I needed.
Fuschias are Sooooo luxurious. They come is so many gorgeous color combinations, and the stores get them in just in time for American Mother’s Day, usually around May 9 -10-11-12. You can actually grow fuschias in the ground here, in the right micro-climate (see, I am sounding like a Master Gardener now, aren’t I – and no, no, I am not) but once the weather gets too hot, they stop blooming. They are just made for the Pacific Northwest.
So Yousef, here are all kinds of fuschias for you, and then, at the very end, your other favorite – I found some lucious shades of tulips for you, too. Thank you for giving me the inspiration. 🙂
I’m sorry this one is fuzzy, but I included it so you could see the color – it is just yummy.
Three fuschia trees:
A Feast for the Eyes
Since I can’t do a sunrise photo, I will do a Spring flowers photo, or more than one, a feast for the eyes to get you started this morning:
Tulips lingering into May:
Flowers to commemorate Memorial Day:
And my very favorite, baskets of hanging fushias:
Colorful Display
This display caught my eye – WOW! Underwear so colorful that you either have to wear something that really covers it . . . or the intention is that it be seen. I can’t help but wonder where we are going, but I love the colors!
Mubarakiyya Basket Man
The basket man in Mubarakiyya has a new selection of baskets; unfortunately none are made in Kuwait. There are baskets from Pakistan, and some that look like they are from the Asir. Some are woven of recycled plastic bags!
Kuwait Book Store
After all the months my reading and blogging friends have been recommending the Kuwait Book Store, I finally got there.
I thought I was in heaven.
Another friend, with us, said she is planning a date night with her husband at the Kuwait Book Store – you can spend hours there, and you can top off the evening with an ice cream cone right outside the door.
This is the only place in Kuwait I have seen Jehan Rejab’s book about the Invasion of Kuwait. I found several other books by her, and by her husband. I found four books on Kuwait by Claudia Al-Rashoud, another of my favorite authors and Kuwait photographers. They have a great selection of books on Kuwait – the best I have seen. They have another couple books which feature or include the unique architectural elements in Kuwait, but not The History of Architecture in Old Kuwait City, the book I reviewed earlier. Some of these other books may be even better! 🙂
There were all kinds of books. Acres of books. Books, and a good selection of greeting cards, and pens, and children’s books. The Kuwait Book Store is huge.
The Kuwait Book Store is just inside the main entrance to the Al Muthanna Mall and Residence, across from the JW Marriott in downtown Kuwait. You go down the escalator, and you are there. I like this mall; it has upper end quality kind of goods; some really good shoe stores, many other great resources. I’m not a big fan of malls, but this mall is a very useful mall.
I only regret it took me so long to get there! What a find! I think a date night at the Kuwait Book Store will be in my future, too. I didn’t get to hit all the shops, just had a brief glance. Do you have any favorites or recommendations at Al Muthanna?
Hope in a Bottle
From BBC Health News comes this report on a face cream that really works.
The problem with creams that claim to prevent wrinkles, or to reverse aging, is that they make claims like “visible difference in 7 days.” I buy them, try them, and after seven days, I may not see a visible lessening of wrinkles, but on the other hand, neither do I know what I might have looked like if I didn’t use the cream. Few of these claims are ever tested scientifically.
You tend to think that the more you pay, the better the cream. It isn’t necessarily so.
Face creams under the microscope
An “unprecedented” clinical trial on a high street anti-ageing cream may change the face of the skin care market in this country, dermatologists say.
At present there is a lack of clinical data to prove which creams really do slow down the skin’s ageing process.
Industry is thought to have shied away from major trials in part for fear products, if effective, could then be deemed medicines and tightly regulated.
But the trial on a Boots moisturiser may prove if these fears are founded.
There was a run on the chain’s No. 7 Protect & Perfect Beauty Serum after the BBC’s Horizon programme last year suggested it might be one of the more effective creams on the market.
Chris Griffiths, professor of dermatology at the University of Manchester, has just concluded a clinical trial on the lotion, involving 60 volunteers over a period of six months.
The data is now being analysed before being submitted to a scientific journal for peer review – in what is thought to be an unprecedented process for a high street skin care product.
“If it is proven to work – and there is certainly no guarantee that’s what we’ll find – then the debate will start on whether there is a point at which a cream is so effective it becomes a medicine,” he says.
The active ingredients in the cream include white lupin – a flower extract – and retinyl palmitate, on top of a plain moisturising base. The trial will not establish which, if any, is effective, but how the combination works together.
You can read the entire article HERE.
Come Back!
Law n’ Order Man! EnviroGirl! Come back! Come to Kuwait! We’ll make it worth your while!
Actually, in Kuwait, “coming soon” does not actually mean coming soon. There was a restaurant “coming soon” at The Palms, and we waited. And waited. The sign was up for months, and the restaurant never came!
We’ve heard there is also a Borders Books coming to The Avenues Mall – but we aren’t holding our breaths!
Prices and Variety
My friends and family enjoyed my last Sultan Center post so much, I am going to add a couple photos here.
The price of eggs is breathtaking:
(Remember, for KD to $, you can figure about $4/KD)
Down below these packages of 6 (top shelf) and 12 second shelf) were flats of 30 for only KD 1.000. They are smaller eggs, and need washing, but that’s what I bought.
The Sultan Center serves a wide variety of people – local and expat – so I always love to see the things they put next to each other. This is a section I call “food helpers;” they are not food, but you add them to something – meat, rice, something that really IS food:
There is no lack of condiments. There is only the lack of the one particular condiment you need on the day that you need it!
Price Moans
This is for my stateside and European friends who have no idea what we are paying for food. Remember those Nestle chocolate chip rolls you can buy and keep in your fridge for those emergency times when your kids come home and remind you that they have to bring cookies to school the next day? Remember when they were expensive – like three dollars or something for a little roll, but you bought them anyway because they are such a Godsend when you are desperate?
I reached for them as I was shopping the other day, and then stopped myself:
Look at the price. That is not dollars. To get dollars, you multiply by about four. (The dollar is sinking in Kuwait, too.) TWELVE dollars for a roll of instant cookies. I can’t do it. I can’t make myself pay that. There are some things I will buy and never even look at the price, but instant chocolate chip cookies? I can’t do it.
I sent my Qatar friends a couple rolls of freezer paper, plentiful in the stores in Kuwait, but non-existent in Qatar. I’ve asked my husband to look for Parchment paper / baking paper, because it used to exist in Kuwait – and it is nowhere to be found. (You bake meringue cookies on it, or you use a paper bag – when was the last time you saw a paper bag in Kuwait?)
I am not complaining. I can find most things I need and even things I don’t need. Some of the shortages, when they hit, are just a hoot!
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