Author Archives: Lissa Layman

TGIT

Posted on by

0

We have a new weekend saying…thank God/goodness it’s Thursday!

I’m especially happy because I just taught my last class as a temporary French teacher at AIS :) The new teacher arrived on Tuesday morning, shadowed me yesterday & today and will take over her full schedule (my 3 classes plus another French and a Spanish) on Sunday. It feels great to be done and I’m ready to be 100% committed to being a Technology Coach. I am, however, grateful that I had the opportunity to get to know some of the students at our school. In total, I now know 51 students in grade 9, 10 & 11. It was also nice to meet the Language B teachers and speak French. The head of department (HOD) also asked me if I would be willing to sub for her later in the year. This wasn’t the start I had envisioned for my school year, but overall I’m glad I had the opportunity to help the school :)

We got reimbursed for our visa & medical expenses…so we have some cash again! We’re headed to the Friday market with a group from school this afternoon. Happy weekend everyone!

Quick edit: it was incredibly interesting to be in a classroom in Kuwait as everything is going on near the US Embassy’s in our general vicinity. It was refreshing to have a conversation with students who can acknowledge that what the Americans did who made the movie was horribly wrong…but also that the response by some people in the Muslim states is juste as wrong. It’s not all Americans and it’s not all Muslims…and it’s too bad that a few people represent all of us.

Money, Money, Money…MONEY!

Posted on by

6

After 2.5 weeks, we’re still trying to wrap our heads around our new money…the Kuwaiti Dinar. AIS gave us a settling allowance…in cash! When we had it in our hands, it didn’t seem like very much. But then when we started doing the conversion, we realized it was a lot!

On our first trip to the grocery store during orientation (more to come soon), we were quite confused by the prices. We’re still in the process of adjusting and trying not to constantly convert to US dollars in our heads. The Sultan Center is one of the major grocery stores here. Other notable ones are Lulu Hypermarket and Carrefour. We’ve found a Sultan Center that is very close to our gym (again, more to come soon!) and we can easily stop on our walk home. It has quickly become our favorite place to grocery shop!

Receipt from our first trip to the grocery store (Sultan Center).

Coins:
5 fils = $.02
10 fils = $.04
20 fils = $.07
50 fils = $.18
100 fils = $.35
Bills:
1/4 dinar = $.89
1/2 dinar = $1.78
1 dinar = $3.55
5 dinar = $17.75
10 dinar = $35.50
20 dinar = $71

There are 1000 fils in 1 dinar (like there are 100 pennies in 1 dollar). One dinar is about 3.55 dollars. We’ve heard it doesn’t fluctuate much. The smallest bill is 1/4 dinar (250 fils); the biggest (that we’ve seen) is 20 dinars.

Arabic side of the dinar bills.

English side of the dinar bills.

Front side of coins (fils).

Back side of coins (fils).

The coins are incredibly small and range from 5 to 100. They also don’t have any numerals on them that we are used to seeing…so we’ve had to quickly learn some Arabic numerals!

After shopping for a couple weeks, we’ve noticed that many shops don’t have enough coins & small bills to make change and prefer you to have exact change. When you don’t have exact change, they usually round in your favor or take less money because they don’t have small coins in their drawers. We get our first paycheck in a couple weeks and we’re eager to start budgeting and figuring out what all this crazy money stuff actually means 🙂

High Class in Kuwait

Posted on by

2

This post is about bathrooms. Specifically toilets. Nothing gross…but you’ve been told.

In the US, you have to pay good money to get a toilet with a heated seat and a water sprayer attachment. I had quite the encounter with one such electric bidet this summer at Dark Horse Brewery. Too bad I didn’t watch this video before getting silly enough to try it out on one of our weekly family trips.

In Kuwait, heated toilet seats and water sprayers come standard with almost every toilet in the country. When it’s consistently over 40°C and most of the bathrooms I use aren’t air conditioned…believe me the toilet seats are pre-heated for you! I’ve already mentioned the water sprayers. I know they are more hygienic…but I’m still the American not used to such extravagance.  Maybe sometime soon 🙂

EEK!

Posted on by

0

Hi family & friends! While we’re busy working, we thought you might like to find out a little more about living in Kuwait as an expat. We just found out about this site from one of the high school secretaries. We signed up for their monthly newsletter and you can too if you want! Just email them and sign up for the free subscription. You can also browse pictures on their site. Head to their YouTube channel to watch videos about “news & life in Kuwait from an expatriate point of view.”

In other news, we got internet at our apartment last night! We’re pretty excited to be able to communicate you guys from the comfort of our own home 🙂

Love to all! ❤

Our first hours in Kuwait

Posted on by

10

Sorry for the hiatus! Students came back to school on Tuesday and we’ve been busy! I (lissa) am currently teaching 3 sections of French (grade 9, 10 & 11) until the new teacher arrives. She’ll be here late Sunday night but I’ll probably be teaching for her all next week too.

So I told you about how we got to Kuwait…but we did actually leave the airport 🙂 All of the new staff met the admin & their families on the other side of the alcohol scanners. We all labeled our bags with our building number and apartment number so the porters could load them on the appropriate trucks. They had water & snacks for us while we got organized and waited for the buses. We were exhausted and it was quite overwhelming to be surrounded by so many new faces. We were incredibly surprised at how BUSY the airport was after midnight on a Friday night. We finally boarded the buses with the other people in our apartment. Now that we’ve been here a couple weeks, I don’t even really remember that bus ride in…it seems so long ago!

When we got to our apartment building we met our building host (Deb is in her 2nd year here and is the Middle Years Programme Coordinator) and she gave us keys to our apartments. We waited (and waited) for the truck to arrive with our luggage, but it gave us time to ask Deb questions about everything we could think of.

When we finally got up into our apartment (we’re on the 7th floor of 17, 2 apartments on each floor) we were a little surprised at how big it was…but also how sparse it was. We were told it was furnished and it was…but with much less furniture than we had expected. It’s a two bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment with an open entrance/living room/dining room and a kitchen.

We’re allowed to do pretty much anything we want to our apartments. Our unit was not repainted after the last tenant left. If we pick out colors before the school repaints for us, they’ll do the painting how we want it which is really exciting! It’ll be nice to have some color and make the place our own. During the last 2 weeks, we’ve been to the mall several times and used almost all of our 600KD settling allowance. Ikea has become our new favorite store and we longingly browse Pottery Barn wishing we could afford it 🙂 These pictures are of our apartment the night of and the morning after we arrived in Kuwait. Hopefully in a few months (after we get paid) we’ll have new pictures to show you of a cozy, homey apartment!

Some interesting features of living in Kuwait:
1. In the summer, the hot water setting is actually “cold” and the cold water setting is actually HOT! The water is stored in large containers on the roof of our building. Because it is so hot in the summer, the water that comes directly to our faucet is hot from being stored on the roof. We also have water heaters for the bathrooms and kitchen. We can turn it on in the winter when the water coming from the roof will be cold and the water from the hot faucet will go through the heater.

Large water tanks on top of apartment building.

2. The switches for the bathrooms are outside the room.

Switches for master bathroom (outside of room).

Switches in the kitchen (washer, dryer, water heater, lights, fan).

3. There is approximately 1 outlet per room  and NONE in the bathrooms 😦

4. Most people don’t use toilet paper. We’ve heard that the pipes here can clog easily. So people clean with sprayers that are by every toilet (yupp…EVERY toilet we’ve seen has one of these with it!) and then dry themselves with toilet paper that they throw in small garbage cans that also accompany every toilet. We haven’t adopted this practice just yet.

Day Trip in Frankfurt

Posted on by

0

Did you read our post about the flights from Detroit to Frankfurt and Frankfurt to Kuwait? If not and you’re interested, you can do that here 🙂

Since we don’t have internet at our apartment yet and we’ve been extremely busy until today, we headed into school today. We didn’t set an alarm and aren’t doing any real work at school. Just getting caught up with email, blogging, etc. Happy first weekend here to us! We’ll add a few pictures to the blog, but we’ll put all of the pictures we took in Frankfurt up online.

Our layover in Frankfurt was scheduled to be just under 8 hours…so we decided to head into the city to beat jet-lag instead of sitting in the airport staring at each other. Our bags were checked all the way through to Kuwait, so we didn’t have to worry about them. Once we got off the plane, we headed through customs (got our passports stamped!) and then inquired about storing our carry-on bags. It was incredibly easy! There was a small place near the exit that held our bags for up to 24 hours for  7 euros (€) per bag. It was a little steep, but worth it for us! When then headed downstairs to the Regionalbahnhof. We couldn’t get the machines to agree with our credit cards, so we went to the counter and bought all-day tickets to get into the city (it was cheaper than buying 4 one-way tickets).

By a friend’s recommendation, we got off at Hauptwache. Before we left Michigan, I had printed off a small map of the area around Hauptwache. We were also told to check out Paulskirche and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. We wandered around for a while with no real aim (we took lots of pictures, went into a few stores…and even saw a dog chillin’ on the floor of H&M). I loved the dichotomy between the old and new. Then we found our way back to Hauptwache so we could actually see the square!

When we’d come up from the train, it had been at our backs and we’d missed it 🙂 In our wanderings we also found a street with market vendors all along it.

We went in search of Paulskirche (free and really interesting historical info)…

…and the stock exchange. The exchange ended up being right where the market was!

We chose one of the food stands and enjoyed!

We had the Rhoner bratwurst, the Kammsteak and the Apfelwein (not exactly what we expected but still worth the try). While we were eating on the benches/tables to the right of the stand, a German business man next to Jeff (and across from me) dropped something on his shirt and stained it. I offered up my Tide-To-Go stick and taught him how to use it 🙂 We love finding places that the locals go and this market was the perfect place! Of course we had to have some dessert too! Although we weren’t in France, we still opted for a Nutella crepe 🙂

We said good-bye to Frankfurt and headed back to the airport giving ourselves plenty of time to pick up our carry-on bags, go through security and find our gate. It was extremely easy and we’re really glad we did it! We’re looking forward to when we have time to take a 2 week layover in Frankfurt and enjoy a little more of Europe 🙂

More info on our actual lives in Kuwait coming soon!

Humid or dry? Just plain HOT!

Posted on by

2

Yesterday on our walk to work (more info about our apartment, school and daily life soon) we were quite shocked when we walked outside. Although it had been humid on Tuesday, we were not prepared for yesterday! When I looked online at the weather when we got to school (about 8am) it said it was 88°, felt like 99° with the humidity at 70%!!! Every time we walked outside my glasses steamed up. Whether you were in the shade or the sun, it didn’t matter…you were instantly sweating profusely. Luckily today on my walk to work at 10am (today is our “Saturday” so I came to use the internet) the humidity had dropped considerably. The temperature was 106°, felt like 101° with the humidity at 13%. We’ve heard that anything about 20% is almost unheard of and that it usually gets humid during the ‘season’ changes. So hopefully that means it’ll be getting ‘cooler’ here soon! We’re extremely excited for the days when the lows are in the 50s and the highs are in the 80s 🙂

We’ve also been trying to get used to talking about temperature using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. The easiest conversion we’ve learned is Celsius times 2 plus 30 (or Fahrenheit minus 30 divided by 2). It usually gives you a rough estimate within 5°. So currently at 11am, it’s 43°, feels like 41° with a humidity of 11%. Today you don’t really want to be in the sun for too long, but it’s not bad at all when you’re in the shade.

For all of you who hate the heat…don’t worry, you can still come visit us when it’s beautiful between October and April 🙂

Update: We walked to get some soup and bread for lunch. Even though the humidity went down to 6%, it was still 47°. During the 30 minutes of walking/waiting, our clothes became quite soaked with sweat. Something we have quickly realized throughout the 7 days that we’ve been here…laundry & showers will be occurring much more often than before we came 🙂

The Plane

Posted on by

3

Jeff has a post about packing to come soon! He’ll show some pictures of his bags & carry-on and my bags. Plus he’ll tell you about why we packed what we did and how much luggage we brought to Kuwait.

Right now I’d like to tell you about the plane ride(s). My parents and my sister took us to the airport in Detroit. We had some traffic on the way and arrived about 4:30pm for a 7:10pm departure. We had some tearful goodbyes and then headed to check our bags. We ended up not having to pay a single cent to check our bags! Even though we would have been reimbursed sometime in September, we were still incredibly grateful! Jeff can tell you all about his theory of using people’s names to get better customer service 😉

We were a little hungry so we had nachos at one of the airport restaurants. I also splurged and bought a $10 glass of wine. Gotta do what ya gotta do when you’re moving to a dry country (more on that to come in subsequent posts too)! We sat for a few minutes at our gate and were called up to start boarding. We flew Lufthansa (arranged by our school – AIS) and were very happy from start to finish with their customer service, timeliness…well everything! I did realize that I forgot my Nalgene in my parents car and the compression sleeves for my calves in my checked baggage 😦

Jeff and I’s goal was to sleep as much as possible on the first flight to Frankfurt. We stayed awake for dinner and (of course) drinks. The wine was free and the flight attendants were walking down the aisles with open bottles offering more! They did always insist that you drink water though 😉 After a glass of wine, we settled in for dinner…

We were very surprised at the quality of the meal! Real silverware!! The pasta was only okay, but everything else more than made up for it. Before and during dinner we also watched movies (we had personal TVs with a variety of ‘on-demand’ movies, shows, music, etc. and free headphones were provided)…Jeff and I both enjoyed Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. I also watched Mirror, Mirror (quite good!) while Jeff watched The Avengers. After dinner we asked for hot water and used the teabags we brought with us (Chamomile). Before attempting to sleep, we each took 3mg of Melatonin and situated our eye masks and ear plugs.

With the help of blankets and pillows provided by Lufthansa, we each got 4-5 hours of sleep and were surprised when we took our masks off and the lights were on! We had another delicious meal for breakfast along with some peppermint tea that we brought along.

We landed in Frankfurt early (just before 9am) and explored for the day (blog post with pictures coming soon to a blog near you!). Our second flight was slightly longer than one might think…we left Frankfurt just before 5pm and arrived in Kuwait just after 11pm. Germany is 6 hours ahead of the US, Kuwait is currently 7 (we don’t observe daylight savings). See the timezone map here!

We were quite hungry on the flight to Kuwait and we weren’t exactly sure what the meal plan was. So we pulled out our healthy soup in a cup (that my mom made a last minute trip to Meijer to get for us) and asked for hot water. It was better than expected 🙂

Dinner was, in fact, served on our plane but by the time they got to the back only the lamb option was left. We decided to be adventurous and tried it…amazing!

Although we watched several movies, we also brought lots of magazines, books and playing cards to keep us busy while we waited in airports and sat on planes. The Frankfurt airport had several international newspapers and Jeff attempted the crossword…but quickly found it harder than the Wall Street Journal! During the second flight, I watched Cider House Rules and several TV shows while Jeff re-watched The Hunger Games. It was so nice to be able to decide what we wanted to watch and when we wanted to watch it! The views flying into Kuwait at night were beautiful!

We were on the plane from Frankfurt with the majority of the new staff. The activities director (a returning teacher) came around to each of us and answered questions and gave us instructions for what to do when we landed. Shortly before arriving in Kuwait, the flight attendants came around with after-dinner drinks. Who would give up a chance for free alcohol!? Our last drink for who knows how long was Baileys 🙂

Everyone from AIS gathered outside the plane upon landing and headed through passport control together. It felt great to finally be here after ~24 hours of traveling! After getting our bags (took forever) we had to put them through a scanner in case we were trying to bring in any alcohol (have we mentioned Kuwait is a dry country…?). The rest is history! No but really we hope to have more posts soon about what life has been like since we stepped out of the airport!

Although we won’t always respond in a timely manner, please don’t hesitate to contact us through email, facebook, etc. Hopefully we can even skype/facetime soon and see some of your lovely faces! Love to all!

Some Entertainment

Posted on by

1

Hello all! We’ve had a GREAT few days of orientation (we have no idea what day it is or how long we’ve been here…our internal clocks are all messed up!)! We meet all of the new teachers and are pretty excited to get to know them even better (definitely some potential friends). Today was our first day of ‘real’ school with the entire staff. It was a little overwhelming but good to see how happy returning staff was to see each other. I (Lissa) agreed yesterday to temporarily teach 3 classes of French while they are looking for a new teacher (could be before school starts on September 4, could be through the first semester). Today we found out a lot of information about the iPad deployment and had quality time to meet with our colleague to start creating a job description and united front. We have lots of ideas for blog posts, but very limited access to the internet. We’ve also been kept busy, busy, busy the entire time we’ve been here (only minutes a day when we’re not occupied). Today starts a more ‘normal’ life & schedule and we’ll be ready to get our civil IDs and internet in the next couple of months.

While you are anxiously awaiting to hear more about our lives here…we were shown 2 videos during our orientation that we thought you’d enjoy. The first one is a brief history of Kuwait through a children’s performance – it is in Arabic and the chorus is (basically) “I love Kuwait” (love the chubby-face kid!). The second is a flash mob that occurred at one of the malls here (we’ve been there twice…nicer than any mall I’ve been to in the US!).