Meet our Villa

We had many things we wanted to accomplish when we first arrived. At the top of the list is finding a place to stay. We looked at a couple of Villas and we found one that fit our needs rather nicely.

It appears that everyone is looking for a pool. Granted Kuwait is hot, but without a chiller a pool is a hot bath. What is a chiller, you ask? Why, it is a refrigerator for the pool. When the temperature stays far above 100F the pool water becomes very warm. The only way to make it refreshing is to chill it down to a cooler temperature. My friend of mine had a chiller in Dubai, but I did not find any pools with a chiller in Kuwait. I do not want a pool if I will never feel like using it.

Freed from the need to have a pool, we had some very attractive properties to choose from. The one we chose was in a quiet neighborhood and was centrally located. Oh, by the way, it is quite large.

Here it is.

Lets start with the outside.

The villa has a nice facade. You will notice that we do have some grass and a gate.













We also have three ducks that cross the street from time to time to visit our yard.














Here is the front door. You can tell the house is big by the fact Dante is tired before setting foot inside.








Here is shot of the first room in the house. The door at the far end is the front door.
















If you look over the railing you can see the downstairs. Notice there is another door under the front door. It leads to the patio.
















You can see a bigger shot of the downstairs to the left.











This is the patio downstairs.












If you look up, you can see the trellis over the front door.














Here is the patio from the ground floor.











We have come back in the house through the door at the back. Talyn is ready to bound up the stairs.

Everything seems so big as we have not furnished much.








Here is the kitchen. In Kuwait, unfurnished also means no appliances. Luckily for us, this villa came with appliances.













We did have to buy a refrigerator. Not the white one at the left, but the big black one at the back.









Our container had not yet arrived and we had been using a costco brand card table (seats 4) for our dining area. That grew old very fast and I acquired a real dining room table.

See the conch shell on the table? Nyssa found that in the Caribbean.




Lets continue on...



We are still downstairs. The office is to the left and the front door is behind us.















We have gone up a flight of stairs. To the left is Nyssa's room and to the right is the boy's room.










Here is the master bedroom. We had to buy beds here and they arrived after 2 weeks in the villa. No more air mattresses!!











Here is Nyssa's room.














This is a cool room. It is a round shaped tv room that comes with a skylight. Do you see the sky light at the top?
The skylight is 10 foot around and shaped like a dome.















We had to buy a tv. Power is 220V and 50Hz, not 110V and 60 Hz in the states. Most US appliances will melt if plugged directly into the wall.













One more of the round room.














That's it. This is our new digs. Hope you will visit soon.

Leaving Salmiya

When we arrived in Kuwait, my company put us up in a small apartment in the neighborhood of Salmiya. It is a trendy place with many of the restaurants and shops one would expect in a happening area. Traffic is something that also goes along with hot areas as everyone wants to go there at night. Although it was very busy, we had good grocery shopping nearby. Including some very nice butcher shops.















However, we grew tired of the busy streets and we wanted a quieter existence in a bigger place. We looked at a couple of places. Two of the villa's looked as if they were part of track housing. They commanded a high rent as they came with a pool. Pools in Kuwait seem to make all houses much more expensive. One villa that Deanna really liked came with a pool in an enclosed courtyard. It was quite big and had a tree growing from the basement up into the living area. There was plenty of light to support the tree. The Villa had a very small kitchen and the villa looked like a fixer-upper. The villa had a lot of character, but it also looked like it needed a ton of work. We were worried that we would always be calling the landlord to fix up the house.

We eventually found a house in Bayan. It was a very nice house, but unfurnished. It did not have a TV nor a fridge. It actually was furnished more than most as it did have a stove, dishwasher, and microwave. In Kuwait, those are not supplied when it is unfurnished. Luckily for us, those items were present and we never had to purchase them. Our container did not arrive yet so we did not have any furniture. The kids, after awhile, seemed to go into withdrawal from the lack of TV.





Mr. Bean is available for immediate purchase!!













The kids were much more excited than one would expect to go shopping. I think any excuse to get out of the house was a good one.

Pictures of the new Villa are coming soon.

Computer Outage

We have had a few problems over the past few weeks. The most notable is our internet problem.

I have a work laptop that I was taking home to do all of our internet related activities. Unfortunately, it started to go on the fritz. As a result, we have been out of touch for two weeks. My laptop is back up and working, but it will take a few days for us to get everything back to normal.

We have moved into a villa, pictures to come later, and our internet service should be up in a week or so. Currently, I am doing things via dial-up which is redicuosly slow. The connection is 56K while our true internet connection in the future will be on the order of a couple hundred megs. It is amazing how fast technology moves along.

The posts should come much faster now as I struggle to keep up.

So much to tell.