Kuwait Day 4: Mamma Mia!

We just got home from the Theatre! (yes, the theatre. not theater.) If you couldn't guess, it’s full of Brits! It’s the same place where I took dance lessons as a child (shuffle-step), and Mom was in shows and choir concerts (and picked up the quirky habit of singing in an English accent). We saw a wonderful version of Mamma Mia. I always love live performances!
Speaking of moms, most of the Indian and Filipino people working here call every woman out there 'Madam' or 'Ma'am'. The only catch is, with their cute accents, its sounds to me exactly like 'Mom'. I keep startling a little when I realize they are addressing ME with 'Mom'!

We spent some time at the grocery store this morning...The Sultan Center (the Americans like to shop here most because it has lots of the familiar brands....whereas the Europeans & Australians prefer a different grocery store called Carrefour). A few things I really enjoyed about the Sultan Center were:
-the 'date cart', where they have several different types of dates packaged differently..syrup ones, stuffed ones, dried ones, paste ones...YUM. My fav are the chewy dried ones stuffed with a pecan. Why can’t we get date carts at Albertsons and Schnucks/Safeway/Smiths/(insert your grocery store name here)?? Here is a little about dates, for those of you who are still figuring out how they managed to package a syrupy man holding a rose and a dinner reservation...

-all of the produce, cheese and meat had English-translated signs on them that list where they are from. For example, instead of just "nectarine" it would say "yellow nectarine, Egypt", or "ground beef, China", or "citrus, Chile”. I like to know where my food is coming from. In this case, it’s from all over the world!

-and last but certainly not least, (my favorite childhood memory from this store) the magic escalator! The store has an upper floor with houseware and sporting goods...which customers can access by a slanted, smooth escalator. It is magic because once you push your cart onto it, the wheels lock onto the floor and it doesn’t move. This prevents major grocery wreckage from splattering all over the store, especially on the ride down!

After some more shopping (sensing a theme, here?) and walking the dusty streets, we headed home, ran some in-camp errands on the golf cart, and had some laying out time on the beach! I'm working on these ultra-white legs of mine. We watched the crabs crawling around, took Zoey for a walk, and played in the sand at low tide. (Zoey is my parents' cute and loving pooch! She's shaved for her 'summer haircut', but she's an American Eskimo dog. Blasted hard to get a good picture of her.) (Another note: the ultra-low tide today reminded me of my Baptism day. I was baptized in the Arabian Gulf, right in our backyard…on October 5th, 1995….on a day like today with a very low tide. We had to walk out so far to get to deep enough water, the people watching from the beach could barely see us out there…tiny white dots in the rolling waves! That was a special day.)

Unfortunately, I didn’t capture a picture of our old friends who stopped by (right when we came in from the beach, sopping wet and down to our swim suits), Gladys and Godwin and their 2 beautiful daughters! They recently moved back to India, and were back in Kuwait on a visit. Gladys was the nanny for my best friend in camp, Katie, back when we ran around and bounced off the walls like all proper 6-7-8-9-10-11 year olds. It was fun to see people who remembered me from when my ‘face was not so round’. Ha! (the rest of me wasn’t so round then either).

I like to ask questions about things I never wondered before…like…where are all those power lines going? Or, where do those blue-and-white-striped water towers get their clean water? And, what is that lighted platform out there in the ocean? Or ones about the people, like…why do some men wear white ghutras and others wear checkered ones, how do the Kuwaiti’s decide where to send their children to school, and who says when ‘tent camping season’ in the desert starts? I feel like a sponge, soaking in all I can.

Another wonderful day in Kuwait has passed by too quickly for this curious girl, and now it is 1am. More tomorrow.
(Oooorr, should I threaten to withhold more posts until I get at least a single cotton-pickin’ comment? Oh well, I’m writing this for posterity anyway.)

Ps. Check out Daddy’s new ride getting a wash! Ooolala.

Pss. I started a new book today, called Small Kingdoms. Very good so far! Another recommended read for those of you Kuwait/Middle East enthusiasts.