My New Apartment!

Hi everyone-

Merry almost Christmas to all of you, and a belated Eid Mubarak! I'm back from Lebanon and leave for MN tomorrow. I'll have pictures from Lebanon up soon, but I wanted to post this video I took today of my new apartment right away. The decorating process definitely isn't over, I'm still not sure how I feel about my paint choices (they looked so different in little samples!) and most of the furniture comes from the school and is therefore horribly mismatched, but it's mine and I love it anyways. :) Enjoy, and you HGTV addicts (you know who you are!) let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements. :)

Happy Thanksgiving!

I wish you all (especially Limpert family) a wonderful Thanksgiving!!! Please note the thank you chain I forced my children to make. :)

Qatar

I'm finding that one of the best parts of living and working in Kuwait is the the travel opportunities. Last week I was able to go to Doha, Qatar for a weekend with three friends to celebrate the birthday of my fellow grade five teacher Tylene. Even though Tylene had a horrible case of bronchitis, we were able to have a fabulous weekend away.

On the flight over I accidentally took a video instead of a picture, which you can see here, and hear the correct pronunciation of Qatar. Special thanks to Lauren Gioe for the magazine we are enjoying!

Qatar is a mere 50 minute flight from Kuwait. It's a small country that juts out of Saudi Arabia, and we found it to be very similar to Kuwait. Our first evening there we explored the old souq, or market. I think all of us spent way too much money there on items such as these Arab nesting dolls. :) We were also able to have dinner and chill out in a coffee house with live Arab music.

Mariam and Marisol, the two other members of our travel team, both speak excellent Arabic, and it was so nice to have their translation skills for the trip! We tried to be cultural and visit museums during our two days in Qatar, but since most of the city is under construction, we spent most of our time engaged in an authentic Gulf State experience-shopping at malls! The Villagio, which was built to look like Europe, complete with Venetian gondolas, and City Center, with a ice rink in the middle, both proved to be excellent places to spend lots of money.

Doha has undergone a tremendous amount of construction in the past ten years, especially to accomodate the 2006 Asian Games (we got to see the stadium where the gymnastics competition took place!).

We were able to walk along the Gulf, see the city skyline, and witness buses actually tilting because they were filled with so many people. Traffic in Doha is quite bad as the city struggles to build new roads to match all of the new buildings.

We also enjoyed really nice night out at an Italian restaurant on the Gulf, complete with legal wine!

Now there are only ten teaching days before I'm off to Lebanon and Minnesota for our winter break! I will most likely be moving in to my new apartment tomorrow, provided they are able to fix the elevators before then, so I'm very excited about that. Another exciting discovery was a Caribou Coffee at a nearby mall! Now I can coffee breaks a la AV in 2000 anytime I want!

I hope you are all enjoying the fall, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving, and I will write again as soon as I'm moved in.

Obama and Weather

Just for fun, I held a little mock election in my class yesterday. The result? Obama 24, McCain 1. My students wanted to know if I could send their votes to America to count in the election. :)

It's getting "cold" here, seemingly overnight. From temperatures in the 90s it's gone to highs in the 70s, lows in the 50s. We even had two full rainy days on Sunday and Monday! It's pretty remarkable because before last week it hadn't rained in over a year. Its fun to see how bundled up the kids are getting with gloves, sweaters, sweatshirts, etc. I even saw a fur lined parka! The sad thing is I feel like it's freezing too! It's going to be a long winter.

Linda Torres

The month of October was marked by an extremely tragic event at AIS. Linda Torres, a woman who has worked extremely hard as a maid at the school for many years, slipped in her home, bumping her head and causing irreparable brain damage. She passed away a couple of weeks ago, and it is a great loss to the AIS community. Linda was an incredibly friendly and generous woman. She was supporting four children and two grandchildren back home in the Philippines and putting her oldest daughter through nursing school on a salary that is a fraction of what the AIS teachers make. There are literally more foreign workers in Kuwait than there are Kuwaitis, both in positions like teachers and engineers as well as in jobs like taxi drivers, nannies, maids, cleaning staff, cooks, drivers, shopkeepers, etc. The majority of these workers come from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and other Southeast Asian countries. They are able to earn much higher salaries in Kuwait and other Gulf countries than they would be able to at home, and many support their entire families on the salary they make here. It is really heartbreaking, though, to think of the time that they spend away from their loved ones to secure the noble goal of a better financial future. Linda is already missed here at AIS. The school is a richer place because she chose to work here.

October in Kuwait

Hi everyone-

So obviously the past weeks have been pretty crazy, resulting in an absence of updates for my blog. Here's the scoop of what happened the rest of October. At the beginning of the month we celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving at my coworker Tylene's apartment, complete with turkey, decorations and pumpkin pie. Although nothing could even compare to Thanksgiving and Judy and Warnie's, it was ninety degrees out, and I still think it's weird that Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving in October, it was a fun evening.

After Thanksgiving it was stress time, preparing progress reports for parent/teacher conferences this past week. I've found that my procrastination skills are still in full working order, but was able to complete all of my grading and my progress report comments before the deadlines. Conferences proved to be a very pleasant surprise. I went into them prepared to really have to prove myself and my grading, but the parents were all incredibly supportive and in tune with their children's academic strengths and weaknesses. I ended up really enjoying the chance to speak with all of the parents.

Adding to my stress levels the past couple of weeks was the fact that the grade fives were in charge of the all elementary assembly last week. Each class had to prepare a ten minute presentation to perform in front of the school. I was really nervous about the project because independent work and initiative aren't necessarily the strengths of my class, but I was so proud of the way my kids ended up performing. We are currently working on a geography unit, so my students split into two groups and did the skits, "Tikki Tikki Tembo" from China and "The Magic Tree" from the Congo. We probably spent about twenty hours in the past couple of weeks rehearsing, preparing costumes and sets, and getting ready to show the school what the kids could do. Again, I had very supportive parents, who even brought in props and supplies including a smoke machine and an artificial Christmas tree! The end result was quite successfuly, in spite of a last minute broken nose of a lead performer mere seconds before we were scheduled to begin! Luckily she is doing okay and another student was able to step in and take her part.

As if that wasn't enough going on, the day of the assembly and parent teacher conferences was also the day we celebrated Halloween at AIS! The kids brought just as much candy as they had for Gurgiyan, and were all very dressed up. We ended the day with a Halloween party, which was the perfect relaxing ending to a very stressful week.

I've enjoyed not doing any school work this weekend! I saw the play "Othello" at the British Embassy yesterday, and it was fun to get to dress up and go out. In two weeks I'm going to Qatar with three friends for the weekend to celebrate one of their birthdays, and there are only five weeks left before Eid Al Adha/Christmas break! Despite the sometimes frantic pace I'm still really loving life in Kuwait. I hope all is well with all of you!

Dubai

Hello everyone-

I'm back from four days in Dubai and have survived my first week of full school days after Eid break. Dubai was an amazing getaway-I had such a nice time with my travel companion Andrea, who was actually the first person I met here. We sat by each other on our flight from Germany to Kuwait, and now our apartments are next door to eachother. We had an excellent experience on our trip from the beginning flying Gulf Air to Dubai, which even serves very cute free snack boxes!

We spent our first night in Dub at the Mall of the Emirates, where we met my friends from India Joe and Shikha and their son Yugaan for dinner. The mall is absolutely incredible-so huge, and it contains an indoor ski hill. I believe it's the biggest mall in the UAE, or maybe even the world, or maybe it's just one of the biggest, but in any case it's enormous. As we arrived on one of the last days of Eid the mall was packed with people, but we had fun doing a little bit of shopping and just people watching.

Day two in Dubai we spent the morning wandering the old Bastika area and souqs. We didn't buy anything, but it was fun to see all of the goods for sale. There are so many expats in Dubai, and many of them are from Southeast Asia, so I felt a little like I was back in India during our shopping!

That evening we went on a "desert safari", which was one of the highlights of the trip. We did sand surfing, which is basically driving around in jeeps as the driver goes up and down sand dunes as fast as he can. It's like a roller coaster and makes you feel like this:

The desert was incredibly beautiful, and after our "surfing" we ate a delicious meal in a giant tourist tent with belly dancing, henna, falconry, traditional Emirati dress, and hookahs.

We did a driving tour of Dubai the second day, getting to see all of the incredible development in Dubai, including the exterior of the Burj al Arab (the only seven star hotel in the world!). You have to pay a lot of money to even go in and see the exterior, so we didn't make it in, but just seeing how built up the city of Dubai is and looking at what it was like fifty, ten, five, and even one year ago is truly amazing.

All in all it was a really fun trip, and I'm sure I'll visit Dubai (and hopefully Abu Dhabi too!) again during the time I'm here.

I hope all is well with all of you!