Our Flat....

Our flat here is far more manageable when compared to the HUGE flat we had in Egypt. It is a 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath. It is probably about a third the size of our flat from Egypt. We don't have any kind of view because we are on the first floor. That is one of the things that we do miss. While the flat is nice and feels very homey, it has come with its set backs. Within the first two weeks of living here we had a water pipe break, the shut off valve on the toilet break, and then the hot water tank blew after all that flooding our kitchen. We also had a leak in our half bath which caused that to flood. One of the most baffling things about our flat is our "cold" water. They have water tanks on the roof here which is where the water comes in and out from. So when we first arrived after sitting in the sun all day our cold water was almost unbearably hot to shower in. The first couple months we lived here we never even turned on the hot water, which is scalding hot like it was in Egypt.

The general layout of our place is nice. The smaller bedroom/office is in the very front this is where I do my homework from. It has a small desk, dining table, a bookshelf (which we purchased) and a drying rack for clothes. Coming out of there we walk into the living room with the half bath to right,which has our washer in after we had them put it in there.The living room is average size we have two couches and small entertainment unit which has our TV, satellite box and some our personal affects on top. Then we move towards the master which on the left is the door into the kitchen. The kitchen is very nice size, lots of counter space, nice big fridge and upper cupboards. The only down fall is the tiny little stove and oven. You can barely fit a cookie sheet long ways into it. There is no real temperature control on the stove top it's either really low or really high. Our master bedroom is a very nice size. We have a middle eastern queen size bed, which is a little larger than a double in the states, a large wardrobe, and a dresser with a vanity mirror where Miranda gets ready every morning. Our onsuite bathroom is large with a large standing shower ( I should mention we have no bathtub) a sink and a shelf we bought when we got here.

All in all, we like our flat very much and it has been much easier to make this more of a home than our place in Egypt, where that was so large it was almost impossible to make it home without spending crazy amounts of money. We have settled in nicely and below are pictures of our flat here.

Pictures of Kuwait

Here are a bunch if pictures we have taken from around Kuwait....

Going towards Miranda's school is large line of small shops that have everything you need.

This is a view down Al Muthana which is the road we live on. It has everything from fruit vendors, butchers, a small grocery store, many,many barbers along with many other shops and restaurants.

This is a small park about a half mile from our flat, green grass and trees. Although there is a little bit of litter here and there, but it is nothing when compared to we experienced in Egypt.

Beirut St., This is the looking down the road towards Miranda's school which is only about a mile from our flat.

Liberation Tower

This is the tallest building in Kuwait, which can be seen from the road we live on and all along Gulf Rd.

The Kuwait Towers, which are working water towers. It also has an observation deck and a restaurant at the top of the highest blue ball  to the right.

One of the many points you can walk out to along the Gulf. There is an area to sit and relax and enjoy the cool breeze from the Gulf.

Another view of the Gulf beach line.

City view from the Gulf.

One of the many highways here, normal roads and lanes are used here. They do not do what they do in Egypt here where a 4 lane highway turns into an 8 lane highway. There are traffic police, and road rules and laws.

Sorry for the wait... We are finally settled in Kuwait

Kuwait City Skyline

      Finally we have time to do some blogging about our new home. It has taken a couple months to get settled in and have time to sit down and type out how things are going here.

      We have no been in Kuwait for 2 months, after taking separate flights to get here and almost 2 days worth of layovers and flights we came to our new home in the middle of night for me and Miranda got in, in the very early mornings.

      Since arriving in Kuwait I can first tell you it is a whole different world when compared to Egypt. The people are different, the atmosphere is different.... Well Just about everything is different here. After being here a week, I think culture shock kind of hit me, which did not happen in Egypt. Kuwait is a great city, it has everything you want and need. They have every type of American restaurants you can ask for ranging from Cheesecake Factory, Red Lobster and even Olive Garden. They have a mall that makes every other mall I've been to seem inadequate. The Avenues Mall is huge they are adding onto it as I speak with will make it a little over 1km in length which is about .62 miles, and there is 2 floors and little side alleys every direction. It's massive. That is the one thing Kuwait doesn't lack, shopping!! They have so many high end stores and malls to choose from I would be shocked if you can't find what you are looking for.

      Now for living here, again so different it's been a bit of an adjustment. Going from having 20 places to go grab a bite to eat at some local little hole in the wall restaurant down the road are few and far between here. We have actually only found a couple. There is not many to choose from. So the social life here is more spent at large gatherings at someones flat. The expat community is basically based around peoples flats, there are no form of expat clubs here like we had last year. The outdoors stuff we have just scratched the surface of seeing the highs have now finally dipped below 100 and lows are finally around 65-70, so more info to follow on this seeing we haven't ventured out much yet.

      Living in Kuwait has been good on the aspect that we can still walk to places like the store, a mall, the pharmacy and other shops we need. We are in the governate of Hawally which is about 4 miles outside Kuwait City. The city is amazing, the skyline is amazing. The skyscrapers here are huge and make ones at home a little boring. The architecture here is one to be viewed up close and personal. The other plus to being here now is being able to go see water whenever we want haha. With a quick 15 minute walk to the east we are right to The Gulf. It is quite nice, especially walking there on the cooler mornings we are having.

      Our flat is nice and manageable here also (pictures to come in another post) going from a HUGE 3 bedroom 3 bath flat to a midsize 2 bedroom 1.5 bath it has been nice. It's been easier to give it a homey feeling. It's also nice for Miranda seeing she doesn't have to get on a bus for an hour and half to go to work. It's about a 5 minutes bus ride a mile away, 15 minute walk if you want to. The school is massive, I have been there several times and the first time I went it took me 15 minutes to figure out where to go and find her. Very easy to get lost in the place. They have 4 different buildings plus a couple of the main campus for Pre-K and KG. The school is very much up to date when it comes to technology, they have an Ipad library where teachers can check them out to be used in class if needed. There is a Smartboard (interactive whiteboard basically) in every classroom which Miranda loves.

      On the cultural stand point here it is very different, seeing that two-thirds of the population are not Kuwaiti citizens. There are many different nationalities from all over including the Gulf States, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the list goes on and on.  The one thing you quickly learn about Kuwait is that the citizens love to shop!! I mean love!! You go to The Avenues on a Thursday night and its elbow room walking down the walkways that are capable of going 7 wide in each direction.  That is where you go if you want get a taste of the Kuwaiti culture, and talking with a Kuwaiti when we first got here that is how the summed up the culture of Kuwait.

      So in conclusion it is nice living here, but very different in so many aspects. We think about and miss Egypt from time to time but it wasn't in the cards to go back. We miss a lot of our friends that we made their and look forward to visiting in the near future. All in all though it's been good here, we have met and made some new friends and they are  fun and always have something planned. It's been to hot to really do much of anything but now that it's cooling down perhaps we can go and explore more and put up some more posts about the things around here. Until the next time the list below will be upcoming posts!

 COMING SOON!!!
  Pictures (so far) of Kuwait
 Pictures and a bit more info on the flat.

Let the next chapter of our great adventure begin....

Today Miranda and I set off on the next chapter in our adventure. We are off to Kuwait where Miranda will begin a new teaching job. We look forward to the new scenery and cannot wait to see what Kuwait has in store for us. Please stay tuned for post and pictures. This time we will try a little harder to keep up on posts and keep people up to date.

1008 miles east...

or 1622km for the rest of the world.

We've been meaning to announce this on the blog for some time now...but just haven't had the time to get around to it, but we slack off on the blog a lot!

But next year, we will be living in a new country, 1008 miles east of Cairo.

Things didn't quite work out the way we wanted them to with my school this year. We absolutely love Cairo and Egypt and while it may not be the easiest life here, we are very sad to be leaving. But things just didn't work out for us to stay, so it's time for our overseas adventure to move east.

I was hired at what seems to be a wonderful school where I will be given a lot of opportunities to grow professionally, which I didn't get here. We also will be able to accomplish more of our financial goals there...and our travel goals, which is a huge perk. It may not have the same excitement, culture and charm of Cairo, but it's the right move for us at this time.

During my spring break, I took a trip over to our new home to check things out, spend some time at the school, but the main purpose was to move over many of our belongings ahead of time so we didn't have to trek them back to the states over the summer just to bring them all the way back this way again come August. I took the trip on my own while Mike stayed behind.

Here was my flight path....

Kuwait is, obviously, a lot different from Cairo. It was very organized and very westernized. Before I went, a friend told us that Kuwait is like the 51st state. Going there, I found that statement proved very true. It felt like I had just traveled to America....just with a lot more Arabs walking around. While I was there I stayed with my new principal and she showed me around. We went to different grocery stores and malls. I also spent two days going to the school and meeting people and watching how things work. The school is huge and has an enormous amount of resources and everyone was really nice. The staff were all happy and laughing and had life in them. A very different environment from where I am working now. That was the best thing to see. They seemed to deal with a lot of the silly BS that I deal with, but not to the point where they have become totally beaten down about it.

Kuwait will be a very different experience for us, but we are excited for what lies ahead.

Here are some pictures from my trip.

View from my principal's flat

Zoom-in of the skyline

Clean, organized paved streets

Stop lights and cars in lanes

Arabian Gulf

Very western stores

Soooo many western products

View from inside The Avenues, one of the big malls ---see the men in white, those are Kuwaiti men :)

The classrooms are HUGE!

You can just see from this picture how many resources are available

Kuwait coastline at sunrise

Construction work in Egypt

I was in the construction field for about 10 years before coming to Cairo. All I have to say is "WOW!" The things they do here are crazy, no regulations are in place obviously by what I have seen. Don't get me wrong I and plenty of others I worked with bent the rules here and there but not as bad as it is here. I would NEVER and mean EVER do construction here in Egypt. I have framed plenty of houses in my years in construction or service something that might have been on a roof. But I always was safe about it, we were required by one company that if we even placed a single foot on a roof we had to be tied off. Here not so much. The pictures below show you what I am talking about.

 The first two picture are of an Egyptian man climbing the antenna tower where most of the mobile dishes are for cell phones and a couple dishes for TV. However he climbed this antenna with no kind of safety equipment whatsoever. He was also alone, so if he fell who knows how long he would be on that roof before some one found him. We live on the 9th and he was above the height of our floor, the top of the antenna is probably 5 stories from the roof. The second two photos are of two men servicing a AC unit. This was right in front of my building too. The first picture shows how high off the street he is. He is eight floors up from the ground. The man with him is only standing there I thought he was at least holding onto the other guys belt loop but after I put the photo on my computer i realized he was just holding the wall up. Again no harness, no safety whatsoever.

These are some of the examples I have taken pictures of since I have been here. But the list of things goes on forever. Their scaffolding here is just timber tied by rope. No nuts and bolts or anything like what we used back home in the States. I have seen men climbing ropes to the roof or floor of building they are working on because there is no elevator installed yet. Even though there are stairs going to where they need to be they choose the most direct path. They work in flip flops here doing major construction, I am not sure they even know what steel toed boots are here. Manual labor is a must if you want to do construction here. I have watched on many occasions men unloading well over 500 bricks from a truck by hand, this taking a full 8 hour day to get done.

The one thing that I will say however, is that I have a new appreciation for the resources I have back home to do construction. Back home you very rarely had to hand drive a nail, cut a piece of wood by hand unless it was finish work or even hand tighten a screw. Here there is no power tools except for tile saws which are not wet tiles saws. So they make cuts with a dry tile saw and again no safety they don't even wear eye protection. Watching these men build something is exhausting to even watch. Day in, day out hand driving framing, cutting wood by hand, everything is tightened by hand. It makes me have new respect for the people that did construction before all the glory of power tools in the States. I think many of us in the construction field would only work half a day if you took our power saw, compressors and cordless drills away from us.

The only other thing that baffles me is how much rebar the use in their concrete work. They use probably quadruple the amount that we do back home. That being said it is understandable seeing that all their building here are made out of concrete and brick. They first start off with their base slab and then go from there. The do floor by floor of concrete pillars and the floor. After they complete those steps they go back and fill in the openings that make the wall with brick. The use no wood for framing here except on the top floor units. They use wood to frame out the windows but then remove it after the brick has set. As they do the brick the run their conduit for electric, phone/cable and also water. After all those steps they then add a stucco to the exterior and interior walls. They use different custom concrete finishing tools to make crown molding on the inside and outside details of the buildings. That's where the biggest thing I noticed that is different, their finish work is flawless, perfectly level tile floors, perfectly textured walls and straight that can be expected. Seeing I don't think I have ever seen a level being used.

Even though I would love to learn from a seasoned "finish carpenter" here I could never get passed the fact that everyday I would go to work, I would literally wonder if I would make it home without a broken bone, a laceration or even worse. In all what I have seen they really could use someone to come here and teach some onsite safety training to get rid of the many onsite injuries here. Would I ever do construction work in Egypt?? No! They couldn't pay enough for me to even except a supervisor position where I don't even do any hands on labor. I wouldn't want to live with the burden of someone being severely injured or dieing. The culture of work safety here is nonexistent!