The Avenues Mall in Kuwait
This if for my outside-Kuwait readers; most of the Kuwait readers have already been to The Avenues.
The Avenues is the newest mall in Kuwait, and has the greatest variety so far of shops with names familiar to most malls – Banana Republic, Starbucks, etc. But it has a couple stores with unusual things – one is a Moroccan design store, but everything I liked inside it said “this item not for sale!” Excuse me? What’s the point?
There is an IKEA attached, lots of coffee places, a few places to eat, mostly places you find in Malls – Paul’s, etc., but nothing outstanding. The coffee places are nice for sitting and waiting for friends who are shopping when you are bored or tired, but if you are interested in GOOD food, I think you can do better eating outside the mall.
The mall is vast. The good news is, there is lots of parking, so you only have to think about where you want to be. We were really lucky, as we pulled in, a car was just leaving a really nice spot. You know how you always THINK you are going to remember your spot? At The Avenues, you need to remember the letter, the number AND the color. Probably the S46a comes in handy, too. We took a photo, and it was a good thing, because we thought we remembered very clearly where the car was, and we were mistaken.
Going to a mall in Kuwait is one of the major summer pastimes. When the heat outside is 118 degrees F (48C), you look for places that are well air-conditioned. We found places in the mall where the air conditioning was working so hard it sounded like being in a wind tunnel!
As for shopping – the quality of the clothing is not the same as you find in the same stores elsewhere. Prices are high, and even when they mark them down, it is hard to think of most of this clothing as a good value for the money. There are no bookstores.
It IS full of light, and a great place for walking – groups meet up at the Avenues purely for walking, and then usually for a cup of coffee afterwards.
So, in conclusion – it’s huge. Positives: It’s light and airy. It’s great for fitness walking in Kuwait’s heat. It’s a good place to meet up with friends, great central location. Negatives: it’s just another mall, just bigger. Not a destination.
What would make a mall that interested me more? A Sephora that truly had the entire range of make-up products that European and USA Sephoras carry. A really good household department with high quality sheets and towels, and well made clothing in beautiful fabrics. An Eddie Bauer. A Clearwater Creek. A Barnes and Nobles. A couple Indian furniture shops. A L’escharpe. A jewelers/gold souk with ALL the major jewelers in Kuwait. A perfumers souk. Some really good local food places.
What about you? What would you like to see in a mall?
Any Exercise is Good
From BBC Health News comes a report on a study that shows that even mild exercise three days a week can help forestall the negative effects of a sedentary lifestyle:
‘Even light exercise’ aids health
Even low levels of weekly exercise could help reduce blood pressure and improve fitness, scientists say.Experts say walking for half an hour, five days a week, is the minimum required to achieve health benefits.
But a Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health report from Northern Ireland found walking on just three days a week gave similar benefits.
The finding could encourage those with sedentary lifestyles to take up exercise gradually, the authors say.
This could be helpful as few people currently meet the minimum recommendations for exercise, with many saying they do not have enough time.
Read the rest of the article HERE.
I find it really hard to exercise in the heat of Kuwait. If you go out during the day, it is like living in an oven. And even hitting the pool is difficult when you are surrounded by oogling eyes. I have exercise equipment . . . and I don’t use it as often as I SHOULD. Aaarrgh.
But I love articles like this that get me moving, that give me hope that even though I am not as fit as I would like to be, any exercise is helpful. Bye! Off to the pool now!
Cheap Gas
Back in Florida, I went to church with my son and his wife. The preacher at this church was very very good. Why do I think so? Because what he said has stuck with me all this time. Here is what he said:
Be careful how you fill your time. Be careful about the thoughts you think, the books you read, the programs your watch.
Bad thoughts are like cheap gas – if you put cheap gas in your car, your car won’t perform up to it’s full potential.
I totally get what he is saying – I think about the time I spend on worthless things, things that won’t matter two instants when this life is over, things I will regret having wasted any energy on.
Think about how we get so obsessed with small insults, unintended slights, even intentional wrongs done to us by others. Think about how we worry about money, about our possessions, about possessions we would like to have, how we envy others or try to find ways to make them envy us.
Think how little they matter in the long run, and yet we obsess, we give these people, things and events power over us by thinking about them too much, when we should be moving on, doing what we were created to be doing, living up to our best selves, the selves our creator had in mind when he fashioned us into being.
I want the high octane fuel in my machine, but somehow, the low octane creeps in, and I keep having to flush it out.
And another thought creeps in – this preacher has never lived in Kuwait or Doha, where all gas is CHEAP! In Germany, I paid almost $5 a gallon for gas, so every time I fill my tank here, I smile.
But what is the quality of the gas we get in Kuwait? What am I putting in my car? I don’t even know!
And would it make a difference if I did know? If the gas we are putting in our car isn’t good quality, is there anyplace we would go to put in a better quality of gas – isn’t all gas in Kuwait from the same source?
Random musings . . . .
No Sunrise
No sunrise photo this morning. By the grace of God, I seem to be back on Kuwait time in record time – it can take me up to two weeks.
I also noticed while I was in the US, I never felt fully on Florida time or Seattle time . . . maybe on some weird level my body was maintaining a Kuwaiti clock? I have taken a short afternoon nap most late afternoons, but I can do that sometimes even without jet lag. I’m feeling GOOOOOOOOODD!
If it weren’t for Rome, Season 2/Final Season, which I bought just before I left Seattle, I would probably be going to bed too early, but it is so gorgeous, and so engaging that we stay up watching one more episode than we intend every night. I know many of you have already seen it, and I don’t know how! How do you get these things before they even come out on DVD?
I couldn’t imagine how season 2 could be anywhere near so gripping as season one, but luckily, I was wrong. We are loving season 2, and I know I will be very sorry when this season ends.
The Wrong Kind of Attention
Yep. If I wanted people to notice me, I would buy a yellow – orange car. Statistically, they are the easiest to see, and the color people most notice. Think fire trucks (in many countries, not here) and taxis – yellow grabs the eye.
Maybe that’s not enough. Maybe we want to be really really really sure people see us. Aha! Let’s put “Terrorist” on the spare cover, in big letters!
It got my attention.
I am guessing it is some band or something.
I am also guessing that it could get a lot of the wrong kind of attention. Yeh, some people just don’t have any sense of humor. Go figure.
International Foods
My first trip to the Co-op to stock up on the basics – when I am gone, Adventure Man eats out or eats peanut butter and crackers, so the cupboard is bare! He very thoughtfully stocked up on skim milk for me, but beyond that, I am responsible.
I have a small, discreet camera but I wasn’t fast enough this time. One of the store people came over to me.
“Madam, why are you photographing this shelf?”
I told him I have a friend (well, aren’t you my friends?) and we were looking at ways the world is becoming more international.
“Look,” I pointed out to him, “here on this shelf you have Louisiana right next to India!”
I’m not sure he grasped the concept. I know he found it very weird that I was taking a photo of the shelves. Maybe he thought the Co-op had hired a mystery shopper (ho ho ho hohoho) and I was working for Quality Control?
By the way, now that I have started checking all my foods for country of origin, did you know that every can of tuna that we buy in Kuwait comes from Thailand? I have not heard anything about problems with quality control out of Thailand, not the same kinds of problems as with China, but they certainly are packing a LOT of tuna.
Even tuna branded “Americana” – wouldn’t you think a tuna branded Americana would come from America? Wrong! It is also canned in Thailand.
Different Day, Same Sunrise
We didn’t have any luck with the Perseids last night – the sky was too hazy where we were. Did you see them?
I’m doing well with the jet lagging this time, except that I find myself wide awake around sunrise – and how bad can that be?
It was beautiful again this morning:
Welcome Kuwait Sunrise
Adventure Man looks at me like I am stark-raving-out-of-my-mind.
“It feels different,” I have just said. “I can feel winter coming.”
The temperatures the last couple days have been 118° F. (48° C) going down at night to 91° F (33° C), according to my friends at Weather Underground: Kuwait.
But the five weeks I have been away have made a difference, I can feel it. The sun is rising almost a full hour later. The clouds are different, early in the morning, and there are more of them. No, no, I am not breaking out my sweaters yet, but the shift of the seasons has already begun in Kuwait, and I am nearly dancing for joy. I love the six months of winter in Kuwait.
For some reason, I am not jet lagging so badly this time, or at least not yet. Sometimes it hits me hard a couple days after arriving, but so far, so good.
And look at the Titian sunrise that greeted me this morning:
Watch out, Kuwait. Intlxpatr is back!
Perseid Showers TONIGHT!
This is from the US National Space Administration so I am figuring if it was scheduled for Sunday, August 11 – that’s right now, that’s night time in the US while it is Monday here. And as the report says the greatest concentration will be just before dawn, that would mean we need to keep our eyes on the skies here in Kuwait just as night falls.
What a show! If you have a camp in the desert, or a boat that can take you far away from the city lights, tonight is the night!
July 11, 2007: Got a calendar? Circle this date: Sunday, August 12th. Next to the circle write “all night” and “Meteors!” Attach the above to your refrigerator in plain view so you won’t miss the 2007 Perseid meteor shower.
“It’s going to be a great show,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center. “The Moon is new on August 12th–which means no moonlight, dark skies and plenty of meteors.” How many? Cooke estimates one or two Perseids per minute at the shower’s peak.
Above: A Perseid fireball photographed August 12, 2006, by Pierre Martin of Arnprior, Ontario, Canada.
The source of the shower is Comet Swift-Tuttle. Although the comet is nowhere near Earth, the comet’s tail does intersect Earth’s orbit. We glide through it every year in August. Tiny bits of comet dust hit Earth’s atmosphere traveling 132,000 mph. At that speed, even a smidgen of dust makes a vivid streak of light–a meteor–when it disintegrates. Because Swift-Tuttle’s meteors fly out of the constellation Perseus, they are called “Perseids.”
The show begins between 9:00 and 10:00 pm on Sunday, August 12th, when Perseus rises in the northeast. This is the time to look for Perseid Earthgrazers–meteors that approach from the horizon and skim the atmosphere overhead like a stone skipping the surface of a pond.
“Earthgrazers are long, slow and colorful; they are among the most beautiful of meteors,” says Cooke. He cautions that an hour of watching may net only a few of these–“at most”–but seeing even one makes the long night worthwhile.
As the night unfolds, Perseus climbs higher and the meteor rate will increase many-fold. “By 2 am on Monday morning, August 13th, dozens of Perseids may be flitting across the sky every hour.” The crescendo comes before dawn when rates could exceed a meteor a minute.
For maximum effect, Cooke advises, “get away from city lights.” The brightest Perseids can be seen from cities, he allows, but the greater flurry of faint, delicate meteors is visible only from the countryside. Scouts, this is a good time to go camping.
And there’s a bonus: Mars. In the constellation Taurus, just below Perseus, Mars shines like a bright red star. Many of the Perseids you see on August 12th and 13th will flit right past it. Instead of following the meteor, you may find you have a hard time taking your eyes off Mars. There’s something bewitching about it, maybe the red color or perhaps the fact that it doesn’t twinkle like a true star. You stare at Mars and it stares right back.
Earth and Mars are converging for a close encounter in December 2007. NASA is taking advantage by launching a new mission to Mars–the Phoenix Lander. Phoenix will touch down on an arctic plain where it can dig into the ground and investigate layers of soil and ice, searching for, among other things, a habitable zone for primitive microbes. The launch window opens on August 3rd, so by the time the Perseids arrive Phoenix may be hurtling toward the Red Planet. Landing: late Spring 2008.
It’s something to think about at four in the morning, with Mars rising in the east, meteors flitting across the sky, and a summer breeze rustling the legs of your pajamas.
Packaging
Dont ya just love it when someone goes to a little extra trouble to delight you?
I have a routine when I get to Amsterdam, my half way point. After all those hours of flying, I love having a shower. I love having the small room all to myself, quiet, to get all clean, to brush my teeth, fix my frowzy-airplane hair, apply a little fresh makeup. I don’t usually get a lot of sleep on my first flight – could it be that last strong cup of coffee I eat before getting on the plane? 😉
And then I wait the endless hours for my flight to Kuwait, trying not to nod off, because the overburdened lounge staff at KLM don’t do flight announcements, and I am so afraid I will fall deeply asleep and miss my plane. All around me are sleeping people – many on their way to Accra, Entebbe, Mumbai . . . and a few familiar faces heading back to Kuwait. Whoda thunk, this early in August, so many people would be returning?
I get restless. I don’t like the lounge food, it has a stale feel to it, and is mostly processed unidentifiable meat slices and hardening cheese, so I head down for the sushi bar. It’s purely psychological, but I believe the miso soup hardens my immune system against airplane-air-germs, so I almost always have a cup of soup and a small tray of sushi, something cooked or vegetable so I won’t offend whoever is sitting next to me on the way back to Kuwait.
And, because the sushi bar was packed, I got it all to go and found a quiet place in Concourse D to sit and eat. And look what I found!
Now YOU tell me – isn’t that adorable?
Normally soy sauce comes in one of those nasty plastic or aluminum packets that you have to tear off an end. This – in a tiny little fish with a plastic screw-off cap – this gave me a moment’s grin in the middle of the limbo of airport transitions. And I thought of you, and how you might enjoy it along with me.
I’m sure it costs them more than a plastic packet. I love it that the top screws off, that the shape is a fish, I love the whole concept.
“It’s just soy-sauce”, you might say, shaking your head in mild disgust at how easily amused I am.
Yes, it is just soy sauce. And packaging matters.
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