I met this cool BBC director a couple of days back who’s in Kuwait to film a documentary about people who are pursuing a healthy lifestyle. She’s looking for young Kuwaitis who would be interested in appearing on the show and I told her I would help out by posting their request on my blog. Here is what she sent me to publish:
BBC– 4x Part Educational & Health Series/Travelogue
BBC3 is working on a series of one-hour long observational documentaries looking at young people who are trying to pursue a healthy lifestyle.
In each episode two young people from the UK who are struggling with their weight will travel to a different country.
As well as an hour on Kuwait, the series will also be filming in the USA, Argentina and Greece.
The programme will be used as an educational tool to discourage young people from leading an unhealthy lifestyle as well as giving viewers a unique window to the country we visit.
In Kuwait we want to show Kuwaiti traditions, lifestyle and culture – including weddings, malls, restaurants, diwaniyas, a trip to the desert, etc.
At the moment we are looking for young Kuwaiti’s who might be interested in appearing in the show, and we would love any help and guidance that you can give us in this matter
Desert Girl sent me the most amazing thing today, a PDF of scanned pages from a National Geographic issue from 1952 which talks about Kuwait. The article is 20 pages long and contains 25 pictures of which 11 are in color. It’s incredible I love it. The caption under the picture above says:
A Mobile Medical Clinic, Bought with Oil Wealth, Tours Kuwait Villages
For ailing Arabs who cannot travel to the capital, the Sheikdom provides an American-built trailer unit staffed by a physician, nurse, and technician. Here the doctor examines an elderly man at an outlying village; other patients wait their turn. Treatment costs them nothing. New hospitals, including one for animals, are part of Kuwait’s heavy investment in its own well-being.
Here is the PDF for you to down. It’s around 4MB in size. [PDF Link]
MyUS is a US forwarding mailbox that has been around for a long time now, before Aramex even but their prices were always more expensive.. or I thought. I always calculated small packages like 1KG and Aramex would come out cheaper but a reader made me realize that MyUS is actually cheaper when it comes to heavier packages. They also offer a few features that Aramex doesn’t offer like you can have them ship your magazines once a month while your regular packages twice a week. If you get a lot of junk mail you can choose not to receive any. You could even ship stuff when you want instead of a regular interval. So for example you ordered a few items from Amazon, instead of having them ship to Kuwait as soon as they arrive to your mailbox you could wait until they’re all in your mailbox and then ship them all together in one box.
If you decide to sign up use this link: http://www.myus.com/AWL
It will cancel the annual membership fee. Just make sure you should choose annual while you’re checking out and it should reduce the amount to just the setup fee. I’m also in contact with someone at MyUS and they’re going to try and reduce the amount of the lighter items to compete with Aramex. So here’s another option for everyone, enjoy.
A reader sent in pictures of the Chairman’s Club which is located on the last floor of the Burgan Bank building. The Chairman’s Club is an invite only club where they supposedly have a KD35 burger. Check out the pictures below.
Today I was lucky enough to be taken on a tour of Infunity which will be one of the largest indoor amusement parks in Kuwait once completed. Three things that grabbed my attention there, the first is they will have a pretty cool indoor roller coaster that’s designed by the same people who build ones for Six Flags. Secondly they will have Go-Kart Drifting which I didn’t know existed but sounds pretty cool. Finally my favorite thing, they will have a huge proper climbing wall! The place will launch early next year and they will be located on the top floor of 360 Mall near the bowling and arcades.
Abdulaziz from Jukebox Society emailed me to tell me that the short film SHARQ is now available to watch online via Vimeo. I never got the chance to watch it so it’s pretty cool I can see it online now.
Most of you know Cinemagic from their weekly rooftop movie nights but it turns out they’ve also got a small movie theater that they rent out. They originally called me because they wanted to participate in the giveaways last month but since I didn’t have any more space left I told them I would post about them anyway because their theater sounded interesting. They’re located near my house so I went to check the place out and was pretty impressed at how cool their set up was. They’re using the $100,000 Sony SRX-R110 4K cinema projector which is very cool, they had a movie playing when I was there and it looked amazing.
The theater has 12 comfortable reclining leather seats and they provide you with free drinks and munchies . You can rent the theater to watch live television so if there is a football match or a UFC fight you could watch it there. You could also rent out the theater to play xbox or PS3 games, they have both consoles just bring your own game. Finally they have both an HD-DVD and Blu-ray player with hundreds of Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies for you to choose from.
They have two rental prices, non peak and peak prices. Non peak price is KD96 for 3 hours while the peak price is KD144 for 3 hours. So if you are 12 guys thats KD8 per person during non peak hours and KD12 per person during peak hours. If you’re interested visit their website [Here].
For those of you who don’t know about their rooftop screenings you could also visit their website for more information on that.
The picture above was taken from the 65th floor of the Al Hamra Tower. When completed next year it will be 77 floors high and the tallest building in Kuwait. As you can see, The Monolith looks tiny in the picture above.
IKEA Heights is a drama series shot entirely in the Burbank California IKEA Store without the store knowing. It’s a very cool idea put together by some creative people with a lot of free time on their hands. So far they’ve created 5 episodes which you can view [Here]
This is a very beautifully shot documentary on the South China Mall, the worlds largest shopping mall. To give you an idea on how big the mall is, the largest mall we have in Kuwait is Avenues and that isn’t even in the top 10 list of largest malls. Dubai Mall on the other hand is the 4th largest shopping mall in the world, the South China Mall is literally twice as big as the Dubai Mall. The problem? Only 12 stores have been occupied out of the 1,500 the shopping mall has.
It’s a 13 minute long documentary but you don’t have to watch all of it although it would be hard to stop. Here is the [Link]
Tonight I passed by a shop called Pro-Hobbies in Dajeej. I needed some paint for my Tamiya crawler and the Tamiya dealer had run out so they recommended I pass by Pro-Hobbies instead. It was my first time there and the place turned out to be really cool. While Tamiya specializes in on and off road electric cars and buggies, Pro-Hobbies specializes in helicopters and nitro powered race buggies.
While there I also got to check out the KHR-1 Robot. I had seen this robot before on YouTube playing football so it was very exciting to see the robot live. They aren’t selling them yet, they just got one to try it out and see if there is a market for it. The robot costs around KD400 which isn’t cheap but the way it moves is just incredible. It’s fully programmable and is driven by 19 servos (motors) which explains the hefty price tag considering a single servo usually costs around KD12. I took a video of the robot which you can see below. It was running out of batteries and the floor was slippery but you can still see how cool it is.
If you want to pass by the store they’re located in the mall behind Showtime in Dajeej. Here is a link to the [Map]. They have a website but it’s still under construction. [Link]
There was an ad in the paper for this new electronics shop that was opening today in Hawalli called Best. According to the ad the store was going to sell Lenova netbooks for KD50, iPod Nano’s for KD20, an 8MP digital camera for KD10 and microwaves for just KD1. The result? An enormous mob gathered around the store waiting for it to open. But, probably due to the fact there was no way on earth they would be able to control the crowd, the store never opened. Check out the pictures and get more info [Here]
Update: Here is a video taken by M.Bahraini. That’s A LOT of people! [YouTube]
