Beach Party!!

So I actually don't live too far from the Gulf. It's walking distance- when it's not the temperature of the surface of the sun. It's a few blocks away, probably about a 15min walk, but you don't really go swimming here. It's just not really done and there aren't a lot of public beaches. Or so I've been told- I actually haven't looked into it much. Luckily for me I have some friends that live right. on. the beach!

Our ward (that's my church congregation) had a beach party out there on Saturday. This couple works for Chevron so they live out on the Chevron compound which is a ways out of town. Our church hired a van for the bunch of us (me and all the Filipinos) who don't have cars so we could get out there.

It was a lot like getting on a military base. There's some political drama going on that has caused them to check everyone going there. We had to have our name on a list and we were stopped by some guys in military uniforms at the gate. They actually weren't letting us in at first because we were all Filipino. They made us pull over and then we watch 3 cars of our people get waved on simple because they were white. I was about to get out and go all American on them but one of the guys in one of the cars that was waved on stopped and was like- um, those guys are with us too.

The house is literally right on the beach. It was so beautiful and such a wonderful day. It was really lovely. They had chairs and umbrellas, jet skis, a catamaran, snorkels... all kinds of fun stuff. We had great food and great company too.

I discovered another amazing small world moment. The couple that lives at this house lived in Kuwait 94-99, then they came back in 2009. As we were talking we found out that I actually lived with their daughter for a summer 17 years ago in Kentucky. I even met this couple 17 years ago. I had been thinking about their daughter, Gina, a lot lately. I had this roommate that had moved to Kuwait her senior year of high school. I thought that was so amazing that she had done that. I knew she went to an international school here but I couldn't remember which one and I couldn't remember her name. I had decided I was going to go to my school library and look at yearbooks and just try to see if it was my school. I knew there wouldn't be too many Ginas so I would probably recognize her if I found her. Turns out it was a different school so I wouldn't have found her. But seriously- how crazy is that? The first Friday I was here the mom told me that I looked familiar. We tried to figure out where from but nothing in our past homes matched up.

Here's a bunch of pics from the day.

Grand Mosque

Today I took a tour of the Grand Mosque. Apparently it is the 7th largest mosque in the world... maybe it was 6th largest... I can't remember now. I'm not feeling well and my brain has stopped working because of it. I've been sick for the past two days. :( I probably should have stayed home and rested but I really wanted to see the Grand Mosque and it was a tour with AWARE-- a group that promotes good relations between Arabs and Westerners in Kuwait.
I'm just going to dump pics because I don't feel like going into details. If I feel up to it later I may come back and add more info.

It's like Utah, only Muslim

So Kuwait is turning out to be remarkably like Utah in some ways. I feel I can poke a little fun since I am Mormon.
In Utah there is an LDS chapel on every corner. In Kuwait, there's a mosque on every corner. Seriously. Here's a map of my neighborhood. It takes me about 5 mins to walk to my school. There's a mosque right next to my school, one a block in either direction and then they've decided that there is not a mosque close enough to my house so they are building another one right across the street. They must have heard that the call to prayer is not waking us up at 4am.
There's no drinking alcohol allowed- which works well for me. At a cultural event I went to they said that Muslims will love to talk to you about religion but be warned, they will eventually ask you, "Why don't you convert?"--- also like Mormons. :)

The red circles are the mosques in the neighborhood. The one closest to my house is under construction. 

The green mosque on the way to school at sunrise. 

The mosque under construction with the green mosque behind it. 

Up close of the green mosque

Green mosque with the under construction mosque in the background-- THAT close!

Bahrain

Well that didn't take long for me to get off schedule. To be fair, I've been very busy AND I still don't have internet at home. I've been extra busy in part because I had to go to Bahrain for visa paperwork stuff. Yes, HAD to go. While I love the idea of visiting another country at the schools expense, the timing was really bad. I missed out on more orientation and a lot of prep time making the first week even busier than it would normally be. 

So Bahrain- Sadly, I didn't see much of it. We flew in on Tuesday night and went straight to the hotel. Guess what- hotels here have a Qaran and prayer rug. I thought that was cool. 

On Wednesday we went to the Kuwait embassy to get the directions and paperwork we needed. We had to go get blood drawn and a chest X-Ray (for TB) and then we just hung out at the hotel. Everyone else was super excited to be able to drink. I was excited to have bacon but sadly the bacon at breakfast looked like someone had boiled it. Yuck! There were four of us that went which was nice so we didn't have to be alone. I had a nice list of non-drinking things to do there but I opted to enjoy the use of internet and do some lesson planning. 

On Thursday we had to go back to the embassy in the morning and again in the afternoon to get our paperwork before flying back to Kuwait that evening just in time for the weekend. We passed the time between embassy visits at the mall where we found this Hello Kitty spa. Apparently there's one here in Kuwait as well. This was extra interesting at the time because the big story going around Facebook was the fact that apparently Hello Kitty is not a cat and is in fact a little Brtish girl...... with cat ears....... and whiskers..... 

Just a couple of random pictures from Bahrain. When we went to get a taxi we saw this car. My friend researched it online and asked some people on a car collector site and they told her that it's only 1 of about 20 in the world. Feel free to try to verify that. I didn't. Good journalist, I know. ;)

We had a nice looking pool but it was still too freaking hot to sit by it. 

There were some really cool buildings. The one right across from our hotel was cool. It had huge wind turbines between the two towers. Apparently this is the only building I took photos of-sorry. 

These was the view from my window-

Here is Bahrain money- again, much prettier than American money. 

This was cool- I'm pretty sure they played some kind of prayer before our flight. I like that. 

And this isn't the first time I've had this happen, but it doesn't happen often, I think it's from the heat and humidity-? 

It shows better in the video but I'm not sure how to attach a video yet..... It's like all this steam/fog just pours into the airplane before take off. It looks cool.