Category Archives: Holidays

Happy birthday!

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This long weekend is in honor of prophet Mohammed’s birthday (PBUH). We’re taking full advantage of the extra time to have fun, eat good food and relax!

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Treats from the Arabic department for Prophet Mohammed’s birthday.

The excitement started on Wednesday morning when we booked tickets for Andrew to come visit during his spring break! His girlfriend, Shannon, is studying abroad in Barcelona and will be meeting Andrew in London for a layover before flying together to Kuwait for a week! We’re all pretty excited 🙂

Wednesday night we enjoyed Turkish food and shisha at Afendim with some friends that we took Arabic classes with. It was a great time had by all…even though the three of us think we have had some side effects from shisha (feel slightly sick).

Thursday morning Abby and I joined some other friends for breakfast at Cocoa Room. It was amazing as always. We shared the cinnamon roll French toast, eggs menemen and hash browns. As we were finishing up our meal, a server came over with an order of peanut butter pancakes. We told him they weren’t ours…but a few minutes later another server came over and told us they were on the house. We were all full, but could you pass these up?!

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Peanut butter pancakes!

After Abby and I recovered from our sugar coma, we decided to take advantage of the day and head outside…for some geocaching!

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Thursday’s weather

Jeff, Abby and I walked a couple miles along the Gulf in the gorgeous weather and logged a 2-part multi-cache.

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Geocaching…in Arabic!

Along the way we found a palace that we hadn’t noticed before. we thought about exploring but decided against it 😉

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No one’s going in there…

We weren’t the only ones that were out enjoying the day…there were tons of people grilling and having picnics!

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Picnicking on the Gulf.

Thursday evening we met up with our friend Dana for dinner and drinks (strawberry juice and 7up sans alcohol, obviously) at her place. We then headed to City Center for bowling! Jeff and Dana were styling 🙂

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It was the first time we’d been to this mall which is known for it’s cheap shops and shoe outlets. I found 2 pair of Nine West boots for 22kd before we headed upstairs to bowl.

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The games weren’t our best ever but I did manage to get one legit strike and one computer glitch strike!

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We’ll share our Friday soon…right now we’re heading out to the camel races!

2 things I’m thankful for are…

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1. Learning Arabic. Tonight Jeff and I went to our a restaurant around the corner to pick up a chicken machine. We go there 2-3 times a week to pick one up and use it in a variety of recipes. We are quite familiar with the guys who work there. Tonight we were able to order in Arabic! We recently learned numbers and they taught us how to say chicken machine. So tonight we ordered one (واحد) chicken machine (شواية)! Exciting 🙂

2. Skype/FaceTime. Today we were able to FaceTime with both Jeff parents and Skype with my family at a family get together! While my family was coming and going during the hour we talked to them, I had one of those moments where I was like “Wow, technology is freakin’ awesome.” We were basically with our families today! Amazing 🙂

Happy Thanksgiving!

World Record Breaking Fireworks

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Last weekend was the 50th anniversary of constitution of Kuwait. It’s only natural that there was a full day of celebration on Saturday and that HH the Emir canceled school on Sunday. We stayed away from most of the happenings but did not want to miss the firework show. There were lots of rumors leading up to the evening and it did not disappoint! We watched the show from the roof of our 19 story building and had a pretty dang good view of 65 minutes of firework. The show was officially deemed the world’s largest firework display of all time with 77,282 projectiles! Although we enjoyed it immensely and we will never see anything like it again, we did ask ourselves “What else could you have done with $15 million?” We did hear that there were quite a few things we missed out on since we weren’t at the show – music, laser show, pictures, kites and more. However we did see the the planes that had fireworks on their wings (see photo below)! It wasn’t until the fireworks stopped and we could see the lights that we even knew what they were!

We took a gagillion of our own pictures and a short video. Click here to see them all.

There was a ton of publicity and professional pictures taken. Have fun browsing!
Watch the entire show
Photos from the fireworks show
New Guinness World Record set
Snapshots of the fireworks
The news made world headlines
Behind the scenes

And a couple videos (not done by us)!
Human emotions during the show:

Kite Flyers’ perspective:

Unexpected Holidays

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Today is November 11th. As you can see in the calendar below, we should have only had 1 day of vacation since the beginning of school for the Eid break (have a post in the works about what we did!). We were told on October 18th that our that our 3-day weekend would be extended to include Sunday & Monday making it a 5-day weekend. A week and a half ago we were told that we would get Thursday, November 15th off for Islamic New Year. This morning at 6:30am we found out school was cancelled today by HH the Amir in honor of the 50th anniversary of the constitution (we had record breaking fireworks last night…post in the works for that too!).

Recap: Thanks to the Ministry and the Amir, we have gone from 1 day of vacation to 3. We worked a 3-day week, then a 4-day week, we suffered through a 5-day work week last week and now this week has turned into another 3-day week! Can’t complain about life too much 😉

Halloween in Kuwait

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Halloween celebrations started last night (started this post Thursday :)! Staff children gathered at the school to carve pumpkins. Afterwards, they made their rounds to the teacher buildings to Trick or Treat. We ended up getting 15-20 kids – they were adorable! After the kids came, our neighbor (Arabic teacher here) told us about a tradition during the middle of Ramadan. She said kids dress up in traditional, formal clothing (not costumes) and go around getting candy. They do it after sunset so they aren’t breaking their fast. We love learning new things about the culture we live in!

Thursday was dress down day at school (once a month students don’t have to wear their uniforms and teachers can wear jeans). This week teachers and students were allowed to wear costumes. There were some impressive ones! A middle school boy had a wooden miniature house made and was from the movie Up!. There was a girl with a zipper on her face…really hard to explain but part of her face was normal and part was zombie – use your imagination. One teacher-friend was Ms. Frizzle, our esteemed colleague was Batman and another friend was Robin…they got all their costumes custom made by a tailor nearby! All the KG1 teachers were crayons and the KG2 teachers were highlighters (black outfits w/ neon yellow wigs)…they looked great! Jeff and I were super creative too – we went as muggles. Yupp, it was quite the costume 😉 I was actually most impressed with this costume (you can always count on Jenna Marbles for some crazy shit).

On Thursday morning at 8:45am, the pre-k, KG1 & KG2 students (2-6 year olds) paraded through the school. All the upper elementary and middle school students lined the parade route cheering them on. Jeff and I made it a priority to attend. It was one of the cutest things we’ve ever seen! Each class formed lines by either holding on to the classmate in front of them (see below)or they all held on to a rope led by the teacher. TOO cute!

Our colleague was the Grand Marshal of the parade 🙂 Masks added to protect privacy of students.

Throughout the day we were really surprised at the number of students who went all out with their costumes. Students of all ages came in full costume. In the US we’ve seen a huge decline in the Halloween celebrations at school since we were in elementary. Here, they are all about it! At the end of the day all the classes in the elementary school had parties. We took a stroll around during last 20 minutes of the school day…we’ve never seen anything like it! Each student brings enough for the entire class – the amount of food is INSANE! I heard about a student whose driver dropped off 30KD (~$100) so she could order KFC for her entire class. One student’s dad owns the local Baskin Robbins…so he brought enough single scoops for several classes. Another student’s dad owns the Subways…her class ate a little healthier. One class we stopped by had the biggest cupcake I’ve ever seen.

Stolen photo 🙂

The sheer amount of food was sickening. I wish I would have had my camera to capture the craziness! We tried to be responsible, but I will say I ate two of the best cake balls I’ve ever had!

So tasty!

The students went home to their parents (read: nannies) on a sugar high and the school maids went home with massive amounts of food. The rest went home with the teachers and we enjoyed it at our own Halloween party last night 🙂 There were several more impressive costumes…and Jeff and I rocked our muggle disguises. Happy (belated) Halloween everyone!