Week 1 in Kuwait!

**This is our family blog, but please keep in mind this is written by me, a 16 year old girl 😂😂**


We have successfully completed our first week in Kuwait!!  Here is a little collection of things we have learned as well as some new adventures!

We've started to get used to living in our new apartment! (Which is very different from the house we lived in prior to this) It has 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a kitchen(ish), living room and 2 bathrooms. The hardest thing that we have had to get used to so far is our kitchen...we LOVE to cook and make good food together...our kitchen in Idaho was very conducive to that! We are getting used to it now so it isn't too bad!

                                         (The only thing not pictured is the sink, but that's it)

I said we had 2 bedrooms, but we only have 3 beds and 4 people...one bed in the Master bedroom, a bunk bed in the other bedroom (for Sydney and me) but what about Adam?? Well, good thing Adam is flexible and down for anything because he gets the couch! He actually really enjoys it so it all works out great!

We can see the ocean from our apartment, and it takes only 2 mintues to walk there! However, we do have to play Frogger across 2 roads to get there. We discovered that it is waay too hot to go to the beach during the day (113°) but right before the sun sets is the PERFECT temperature!

The HEAT! The 4 of us LOVE the heat. We would take heat over cold any day. We thought the heat in Kuwait would be totally unbearable, but so far, we have (mostly) really enjoyed it. When we wake up, it is usually over 100° degrees and when we go to sleep, it is usually over 100° degrees. This week, it has been about 111°- 113° degrees.

There is definitely a language barrier. None of us speak a lick of Arabic. We have run into people who don't speak any English, who speak a little English or a very few who speak English pretty fluently. It's convenient that my mom is a ninja at Charades and can act out what we need while saying it very slowly and over enunciating. I'm slowly learning the art of Charades (yes, it is an art), but I'm definitely not as good as her yet.

This week we spent some time in The Avenues mall. This mall is HUGE. It's the 22nd biggest mall in the world (which surprised us after going in that it was ONLY the 22nd biggest). We mainly went there for IKEA (the first time) to get some odds and ends for our apartment, but we did do a little exploring on top of that. There is a full blown grocery store, multiple duplicate stores, restaurants, IKEA, a movie theater and many more things to do there. We didn't get to even really explore most of it, but we have fun walking around it!

My mom and I LOVE grocery shopping (not even joking). It is so fun for us to see what different stores in different countries have! What we discovered here is that it has lots of the same stuff that they had in Singapore with drinks, candies, produce etc. There were lots of new things too that we are excited to try! I love how with all of the fresh produce, meat and beans they say where they are from. It was fun to see the potatoes from Egypt, the onions from India, the herbs from Kuwait and the beef from New Zealand

I know this is really weird....but I love it so much. In grocery stores that I have been in that are not in the USA, they have fresh fish out and on the ice, kind of out for display. I love that they do that; the smell and everything! I don't know exactly why I was so excited to see that and why I love it so much, but it is what it is.

STORIES

This week, we rented a car to get around just to see what we wanted to do car wise while we are here.  This day already started rough because I got a bloody nose in the rental car. We didn't have any tissues or anything and the seats were cloth. Thank goodness Adam was willing to spare his favorite shirt for me! We were on our way to The Avenues (giant mall) so we bought him a new shirt there. (We were able to get all of the blood out of his shirt so don't worry). We really went to Avenues to get lots of groceries and pick up a few last things at IKEA. My mom tripped going into the mall and has a nice huge welt from it along with a few bruises. After we got everything in our trunk, we tried to shut it (as one does) and it wouldn't shut. So, there we were, my mom and I in 113° weather trying to shut our trunk. It was hot, no one spoke English and we had food that needed to be put in the freezer/refrigerator. Some very kind Kuwaiti men tried to help us shut it, but it wouldn't shut. They did help us tie the trunk down so our groceries wouldn't spill out of our car while we drove home (we used a ripped up plastic bag). As we were going, the plastic wasn't keeping the trunk as secure as we hoped so we pulled over to try to figure it out. We used 2 hair ties to help the plastic bag keep it in place and secure the trunk even more. As we were on the side of the road, a few more Kuwaiti men stopped to help us tie it down (and it worked)! The rental car company took it and fixed it for us, thank goodness! The day ended beautifully with the 4 of us playing on the beach and soon this traumatic time was over and hilarious!
 (We didn't get any pictures during the car fiasco because it was a stressful time 😂)

We have run into so many kind people here who are so willing to help us. We befriended a really kind taxi driver who went the extra mile to help us get cell phones and who was willing to pick us up when we called him, we briefly met some men who helped us with our car problems and there were people in a small neighborhood grocery store who helped us know what the Kuwaiti coins were worth.

We love Kuwait, we love the ocean, we love the heat, we love the palm trees, we love learning about the culture!