Thoughts on Kuwait

For any friends who are reading this and have lived here...here are my random thoughts that I have collected over the last year or so on living in Kuwait.  It is my perspective on how we handle ourselves here and may not be true of you...

Thoughts on Kuwait: 

-I avoid eye contact with men in dish dashas unless they are fathers of friends of our children. Then I don't know what is the correct thing so I just go with American customs and shake their hand, look them in the eye and make conversation. 

-Anytime I see a female friend who is generally not American, we greet each other by pressing our right cheeks together and then our left cheeks together to kiss. I do not do this with American friends. 

-I drive on the highways with speeds in excess of 80mph and feel like I'm crawling at 55mph. 

-We've made more u-turns in these last 4+ years of life overseas than all of our driving years combined previously. 

-There are rarely left turns but there are copious u turns. We do them all the time. 

-We have our fridge STOCKED with beer because there's no where else to go for it. So we often host out of towners at our house.

-Our children have classmates say they are glad an American presidential candidate lost because if he was elected, he would have attacked nearby countries...and having your 5th grader ask you if that is true. 

-Having people brake and put their emergency lights on to signify that they are indeed slowing down...quickly! 

-At the mall in the parking lots there are sensors over each parking spot that have a red signal light to say someone is parked there and it turns green if it is empty so you can look down a long row and know immediately if there are empty spots.

-Wasta (loosely translated "who you know").  It is the stuff of any business transaction here in Kuwait.  It amounts to getting something through favoritism rather than through merit.  

-At the grocery store a guy loads my groceries onto the conveyor belt, packs them into bags and walks the shopping cart out to my car and loads it. For 1/4kd. 

-I never make eye contact w other drivers ever. Or people in cars. It's weird. Because of me trying to avoid eye contact with men.  It also means that I miss many "sights" in Kuwait because I don't take the time to "stop and look around". 

-There are separate sitting areas in waiting rooms at the doctor. One for men and one for women.  When I've had to take Jack to the doctors, I don't know where to sit.  He's too old to sit with the ladies, but too young to be by himself with the men.  We end up sitting some place random.  

- It takes the kids 45 min to get to school in morning.  At 3pm it normally takes me 7 minutes to drive the same route. 

-If Dan leaves at 7:30 for work, he gets there at 8:15. If he leaves at 8, he gets there at 8:15. 

-I do not have to pump my gas because I'm a lady. 

-It costs us 4kd to fill up our Sienna minivan. Approx $14.64USD.