Day 31, Monday - Kuwait

Today is the one month marker for my trip! I left home September 18th and here we are on the 18th of October (by the way, this also means that my birthday is one month away, in case you wanted to know).

At Muhsen’s office today, I had some more meetings including some time with Muhsen himself. While I was meeting with Muhsen, he had a Saudi client come in and so I got to chat with him about doing business there. Rima also stopped by for a visit. After the Saudi gentlemen left, Rima started talking to Muhsen about a potential deal she is working on.

At one point in the conversation, which was in Arabic, she paused, looked over at me and said, in English, “I’m speaking in Arabic because I know you can understand it.” I laughed because I think she is over estimating my skills a bit. I can generally follow the conversation, but I often miss the details. Plus, in Kuwait as in Jordan, people mostly speak English to me, and typically a mix of half-English half-Arabic, with percentages varying among the age groups. I have fewer opportunities here to sit and listen to Arabic conversations as English is the main language used in the house.

This evening I finally went to a shopping mall to attempt to shop a little. Maha met me at "The Avenues" and we ended up going to a coffee shop (I had hot chocolate) and chatted most of the time. Kuwait is supposed to have some of the best shopping in the region and everyone keeps asking me which malls I have gone to. They are all rather shocked when they find out I have hardly been in the malls. I’m much more interested in visiting people and I have been spending most of my time doing so. Although, from what I have seen, this would be a great place to shop.

"My" juice stand in the mall, and I didn't even know I had a juice chain ;)

On the way home we blew a tire. I always thought if that happened I would feel the car shake or jerk or something, but we just suddenly heard a strange sound, like what it would sound like if you were driving around on a flat tire. We pulled off the freeway, got out, and saw this:

The picture doesn't really do it justice. Trust me, it was pretty shredded.



Looking back towards the traffic. 

I now know how to change a tire. Granted, I didn’t do any of the actual work because he wouldn’t let me help, I just supervised and took a couple pictures.