I came across this website by mistake 2 years ago, or was it last year? not sure. I like the downloads section, it contains many of our favorite Kuwaiti sitcoms, like Khalty Gmasha and Darb Alzalag. A month or so ago I learned from a friend that the website is created by some Kuwaiti students who are studying abroad, in the UK. I think they did a great job. I hope they add some more Kuwaiti sitcomes and plays (masra7iyat) though 🙂

The download section’s LINK.

Just thought I’d share my current homemade wallpaper with you guys, I think it looks nice as a desktop picture. 🙂 Click on the pic above for the bigger version.

Going to the hospital all through last week in this country made me realize how lucky we are. We’re beyond lucky, We’re blessed 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 nut they required some tests to be ran so we were place in their hospital beds.

Nowadays is possible to bring help to any place that you want, this mobile medical trailer manufacturer creates mobile units with all the equipment that you need to take care of your patients.

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. Cardiology 3 may prove very useful in such situations.

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 we have a Joint Pain Clinic in Greensboro, NC – QC Kinetix (Greensboro). 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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I just finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by the awfully talented Khaled Hosseini. I should first say that the writer didn’t drift away from what made him famous; his first novel. The story is set in Kabul, afghanistan and it sees much of what we already have read in The Kite Runner, and it adds some more.

I enjoyed the novel, I enjoyed the plot, the characters, the war-zone atmosphere and above all I very much enjoyed and marveled at the way he writes. Its a story of a young harami (bastard), her name is Maryam, who lives with her mother in a hut away from her father, who came to visit once a week. She awaits his arrival every week with patience, every single week, and loves him dearly and relentlessly, inspite of her mother’s constant bashing and warning that one day he won’t come to her anymore and will forget about her exactly like how he forgot to publicly own his mistake and let her, Maryam, live legitimately with her other sisters from his other wives.

The writer then starts another story with another girl who lives down the street from Maryam, her name is Layla, who is in love with Tariq. Fate plays the cruelest games with these 2 girls. They learn much about life and how, at times, it means nothing and everything at the same time. You learn much about how life was not so nice to Afghan girls during the 70’s, 80’s and ofcourse their worst days in the 90’s during the Talibans stage.

I recommend this very well written novel to everyone. Its like what you’re probably going read if you ever (not possible) read one of Amir’s* novels.

* Amir is the boy in Hosseini’s first novel.

I forgot the wallet in one of my pant’s 6 pockets and threw the pant in the laundry basket. 😀 After searching everywhere, we finally found the wallet at the bottom of the washing machine soaking wet and soapy. The money didn’t take much time in the sun to dry up.. I wish I could say the same thing about my wallet.

“Although Apple is marketing Mac OS X Snow Leopard as an operating system update with “no new features,” under the hood improvements will actually translate into a slew of new enhancements”

“New multi-touch framework

With all Apple notebook systems due to ship with multi-touch enabled trackpads following this summer’s MacBook and MacBook Pro design overhauls, Apple is putting the finishing touches on a complete multi-touch framework that will ship as part of Snow Leopard.”

“Slimmer applications

Another goal of Snow Leopard is to reduce the overall footprint of Mac OS X so that it can be scaled to a growing array of mobile devices that will rely on lower capacity solid-state Flash RAM drives, like the upcoming Apple Newton Web tablet.”

“Text processing features

Taking a page out of Redmond’s handbook for once, Snow Leopard will also leverage text processing features originally conceived by Microsoft as features for Word.”

“Auto Activation

Apple will also build out its Data Detector technology with Snow Leopard. In addition to extracting contacts and events from Mail as it does in Mac OS X Leopard, the technology will be used to help expand upon Font Book to provide full Auto Activation of any fonts requested by any application, using Spotlight to track them down.”

“ZFS Support

Finally, Snow Leopard will also be the first version of Mac OS X to boast full support for the much ballyhooed ZFS file system, originally designed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris Operating System.

Mac OS X Leopard debuted read-only ZFS features, but Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server will provide both read and write support for the new 128-bit file system.”

Note: You know what I think the most important phrase in all of this copy-paste fest that just happened? This phrase “ship with multi-touch enabled trackpads following this summer’s MacBook and MacBook Pro design overhauls.” uhhh… WHAT!! 😯

Taken from Apple Insider, here is the FULL ARTICLE.

Thanks Taymoor.

This is how they do it, incase you ever wondered 😛

Thanks INM.

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

I think this been going on for awhile now and not only to our posts, other blogs’ posts too aren’t showing on Safat. I don’t know how long this is going to take.. Does this mean that this is a beginning for the transition to Salwa.kuwaitblogs.com?

Oh and I Just now realized that with us changing hosts from wordpress.com to our own server we’re no longer listed on wordpress and their tag system. Great timing to lose 2 sources of visitors, dontcha think?

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.

They do delivery on this # 834 834.

Thanks Fatma.

We have a reader, `zEzO !, who is a beginner in photography like myself. He has some photos he’d like to share with rest of us so we can all help provide some kind of critique. Here are his photos:

Look into the gallery and make sure post your comment, tell him what you think.

Hope this helps `zEzO ! 😉

As you may already know, I’ve been looking everywhere for hotspots because of my internet problem, and I came across this interesting website recently that offers you a list of free hotspots all over the world. Take a look HERE.

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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