Every year Mom goes to the botanic shop near us and buys some more hydrangea plants to replace the old and dying ones. Sometimes she buys 2 and sometimes more, depending on how bad/good last year’s plants are holding up. When I’m here when and we go to the botanic, I always try my best to steer her away from buying the same flowers, I try and try AND try! but to no avail. I don’t know what is it with these flowers and I don’t know why all the other gardens around us have this same flowers. these and the lavender. Once the mission to buy a different plant this year failed (failed miserably. We bought 3 new hydrangeas!) I insisted on buying these little dividers/partitions just so I would feel like I made a tiny difference this time

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Going to the hospital all through last week in this country made me realize how lucky we are in Kuwait. We’re beyond lucky, We’re blessed in Kuwait and we don’t even know it.

We had to go to hospitals many times during last week and every hospital, doctor or waiting room we’ve seen (and smelt) was an eye opener to us all. Not only they’re understaffed, overcrowded, inefficient, stupid and retarded, but they also suffer from a serious lack of TIME-awarness! they don’t give a damn about the time the patients spend waiting inline. I mean.. we were in a hurry to get an injection, almost a routine injection, yet we had to wait inline for 3 hours just to get this done. 3 hours for a simple injection. Had the same thing happened in Kuwait we would’ve been in and out of the hospital in 10 minutes.

The other hospital we’ve been to was something else, the doctor whom my brother waited so long to see was an english illiterate doctor. She knew nothing about english, english was an alien language to her. She couldn’t treat a goat if her life depended on it! let a lone a human being! which made my brother get up and leave, without getting the proper med care he waited hours for.

You can’t go and get treated for a flu, cold, fever, broken arm, broken neck without waiting inline for hours. and I literally means HOURS.

We’re very lucky in Kuwait. Very. I’m not saying there is no room for improvement, I’m just saying that every once in awhile we need to stop and realize how fortunate we really are.

As promised, Goats Town! in all its glory Its in France, near Chamonix. approx. 30 mins away from both Chamonix and Geneve. Its in a mountain where a city called Morzine is located nearby, The obscure place in which this Goat’s town reside is called Les Lindarets.

The town is pretty small and filled with, well, Goats. They lay and walk around freely, you can buy specially packaged food and feed them (rizg lig6awa) they pose and follow you whenever they spot the plastic bag, which contains their food, in your hand. sometimes, in not so rare cases, they hassle you and pull the plastic bag out of your hand, leaving you feeling both angry and silly.

They’re all gathered around this giant salt cube, licking it and there are many other cubes lying around the place from them to suck into. From what I understood, Goats love salt and they’d do anything to have their salt fix. In Kuwait I saw them licking the cement around their cage just coz it got some salt in it. They actually made a dent in the cement from all licking!

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A whole post dedicated to Goats’ town is coming up soon.

We went to an italian restaurant the other day, it was recommended by Hamad’s boss. When we first saw the street it’s located in and the neighborhood we had our little doubts. We know that restaurants in europe and especially in switzerland aren’t flashy and the best restaurants always look kinda cheap, but still, the place looked weird for some reason, maybe being behind the train station and all.. I don’t know. We wanted to sit outside but the waiter told us that we only have this cramped table to sit at coz the other section is not being served for the night. We didn’t sit outside and went in. The restaurant is small and not so cozy, there was a football game being played on TV and italian waiters arguing loudly. My brother couldn’t have been any happier, being an AC Milan fan and all, he couldn’t have wished for a more italian restaurant to be in.

We sat and the Pizza oven was right next to us, the smell was killing us, it smelled so good inside! we skimmed through the menu. We knew we’re going to order pizzas for starters, it was only a matter of quantity and we all ordered the same maindish (by accident, I’d like to believe), a home made tagliatelle with creme and mushrooms.

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Well, I hesitated for a bit before really going ahead and make this post, I didn’t want to show the extent to which I went to make the sky that shade of blue, or the grass that green.. not to mention the sun which I created from a scratch But what the heck. Here are both photos, both in HDR but with no photoshopping whatsoever. promise.

The Original Picture

The Photoshopped Picture

Can you tell the difference? They’re identical! getlekom mako farg

Playing around again with photoshop and the camera. Click on the pic for a bigger version.

A picture of Evian’s lakeshore. (yep in HDR )

We went to Evian and I made sure this time to visit their source of free Evian water. They park their cars infront of this little water fountain and fill up their empty bottles, costing them nothing but the gas money to drive up to this place. which is very near the center of the town anyway.

It doesn’t stop running, 24/7. fisag.

These 2 ladies were there filling their bottles. I asked and they didn’t mind me taking pictures.

Me, pouring and refilling the bottle a hundred times and it was COLD! just the way I hate it.. makes my teeth ache.

This is the Evian water museum.

Samples of the bottles old and new and their entire collection of Evian products.

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We pay for the DSL service the whole year nonstop just to be able to enjoy the month or so we spend here without the need of interacting with their ISP (France Telecom). But they NEVER fail to let us down and they always meet our expectations of bad service and incompetency. As I said before in another post, the internet has been cut off, as of yet, for unknown reasons, and its been like this for 5 days now. No internet for 5 days, save for the random cafes and mcdonald’s here and there. Wifi begging is so not what I want to be doing while I’m on vacation. Allah yakhith il french o their service o takhalofhom!!!!

Note to Labeeba: your house is disconnected too.

Posted from Migros.

We went to Gruyère the other day. We go there mainly to indulge in cheese. They’re the number one source of the best cheese in switzerland and maybe all of europe. We go there prepared, we don’t eat anything heavy before heading to Gruyère. We order their raclette; a block of cheese they put under a some tiny cheese heater/griller (shown in the pictures), and their fondue which also is made of melted cheese. And for the dessert, we either order their hot chocolat viennois or their denmark icecream (I once ordered both and felt sick afterwards). Everything there is to die for. I’m gonna leave you now with the pics, 19 pics to be specific

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I used my wide angle lens again, I took this picture of the church (completed in 1272) while holding the camera well below my knees just to be able to capture the whole church, and I still managed to miss the top cross. oh well.

Now, photography gurus, I have a question for you, I can’t get the fuzziness out of the trees, and any moving object for that matter. I tried to sharpen the image, did the smart sharpen thingy but it didn’t help. Any advice? and yeah I’m asking coz I’m using HDR without a tripod.

The area where we’re staying are having some problems with the internet service and I’ve been cut off since yesterday. I can’t live without going online whenever I want to! I’m in Mcdonald’s now writing this post (Allah yadinya) I have only 30 minutes (7azarat ilfaranseyeen). I went to 2 nice places and took many pictures, I’ll post them whenever we get our internet back. for the time being I uploaded the picture above just coz it was my first decent pic of a bird. It’s flying over Lac Léman, in Evian to be specific.

Click on the image for a bigger & fuzzier version.

Today we were discussing this issue in my father’s in law house, yes how come our airport got a duty free shops and our country doesn’t apply taxes?! i went to Wikipedia and double checked “Duty free” definition and came out with this:

Duty Free shops: Duty-free shops (or stores) are retail outlets that do not apply local or national taxes and duties.

Can anyone clarify this to me?!

Picture

I wanted to use the Sigma lens yesterday and the sun was already fading away. Some pictures were much darker and I had to photoshop the hell out of them. I didn’t really like the end results, they were much better when I saw them in my camera’s screen than my laptop’s.

We went to Chamonix yesterday. There was lots of clouds everywhere so I couldn’t really take pictures of the mountains out there, Mont Blanc was there but we couldn’t see it. Mont Blanc’s peak (4,807 m) is the highest peak in all of western europe. I’ll leave you with the pictures now.

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2 days ago we were at a cafe and I wanted a nutella crepe. I asked for Crepe avec chocolat, then I said avec nutella, But the lady at the counter replied with a superior tone I didn’t care for “you’re in switzerland you should eat the swiss chocolate, not nutella.” I think chocolate crepes are supposed to be with nutella not any other kind of chocolate, and I told her so as she was already in the process of making the crepe with her swiss chocolate.

I liked the end result. I liked the flaky/powedery chocolate she poured over the crepe and how it melted. Nutella would’ve been 10 times better, thats for sure, but it was good nonetheless.

I hate snobby europeans.

Found this on the ground the other day while I was taking pictures. I don’t really think its a rose, or a flower for that matter, I think its probably something that fell off a pine tree or something similar, But I always wanted to use the word “petrified,” ever since I saw Harry potter and heard this word for the first time.