First Day of School

The kids started school last Sunday. Since the weekend here is Friday and Saturday, school and the work week starts on Sunday. The kids go to the American School of Kuwait which has close ties with the US embassy. It is a private school that teaches K through high school. The one nice thing about the school is that there is a uniform.

Do these look familiar?












The school started on September 7th, but enrollment was not assured. The kids had to be tested first. Testing took place on the previous Sunday. The kids took the tests, went home and waited for results. We really wanted the kids to get accepted as the other good school on our list had already started classes. Tuesday afternoon we received the good news that kids were accepted.

Now we need supplies....

It was a such a headache getting school supplies for the kids. It was a mad rush as parents rushed to get everything their kids needed. The most frustrating part was the nearly endless list of items that Deanna had to find. This was complicated by things on the list we were unsure exactly what they were. The kids needed envelope folders and pocket folders. What are pocket folders? We went to the store and it was packed. Plus the items were not marked "envelope folders" and "pocket folders". Many parents simply guessing what was the closest item to the list. It was very democratic--if more than one parent agreed that a particular item was close enough to what was on the list, then everyone took it home and scratched off one item off the list.

The next thing to get was uniforms. This was another trial as most of the uniform selection had thinned as first day of school approached. We were at a huge disadvantage buying uniforms so late. Deanna was able to find shirts, but no pants for the boys. And then it was nigh impossible to find PE shorts. In fact, we did not finish getting the PE shorts until after school started.

Deanna drives the kids to school. There is a bus option, but the kids board the bus approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes before school starts. Deanna thought that was too early so she is driving them to work for now. One would think that dropping kids off would be a snap. Unfortunately, the roads near the school are so narrow that it takes a very long time to drop off/pick up the kids each day. The school was started in the 60's so there was not a large, empty piece of land to help it expand later on. Rather, it was hemmed in, unable to expand. I am sure there has been attempts to fix the problem, but nothing has met with success. I think the traffic problem is here to stay.

The kids take the normal school subjects plus the language instruction. By law the kids must take Arabic lessons. In addition the kids take Spanish as well. You see the school is 1/3 American, 1/2 Kuwaiti and 1/6 other. If a child is Arabic, they must take religion classes at the school. Those that are not muslim take Spanish instead. Thus they are taking English, Spanish, and Arabic lessons. I always wanted the kids to take Spanish lessons and now they are able to!!


Life is moving along, one step at a time.

The elevator

The kids were excited that our short-term housing was an apartment in a building with an elevator. They would prefer it if the building also had a pool, but the elevator was good enough. We were on the 2nd floor so there was not much need for an elevator; I prefer to take the single flight of stairs instead.

Talyn loved the elevator; it had buttons and it was in the building. He would often run ahead and take the elevator by himself.

One day I received the panic call at 4:00 that Talyn was stuck in the elevator. I was at work and all I heard was pandemonium emanating from my cell phone. Deanna and the kids were about to pick me up from work. Talyn ran out of the apartment and got into one elevator and took it down by himself. Nyssa, and Dante took the elevator while Deanna took the stairs. When Deanna reached the bottom first as the stairs are faster than the elevator, she saw Nyssa and Dante arrive at the bottom floor, but stood there waiting for the Talyn's elevator to open.

Talyn's elevator door never opened. The elevator got stuck and remained at the ground floor. Talyn began to panic while Deanna tried to calm him down. Talyn manually opened the doors a little bit a which point Deanna saw that the elevator was not flush with the floor. So Deanna told him to not push anything and too release the doors. She thought that if he released the doors the elevator would settle and the elevator door would open. After a couple of minutes, the doors did not open and the elevator light went out. Now Talyn was stuck in the elevator in the dark.







Talyn at the scene of the incident








That is when Deanna decided to call me.

I picked up the phone and Deanna was....concerned. Well actually she was close to a full on panic. In the background, I heard Talyn wailing. Nyssa and Dante were crying as well. Deanna did not know who to call. I decided to call the caretaker, but I did not know his number. Luckily his number is posted in the lobby. Deanna gave me the number and I went to talk to my colleague. You see the caretaker only speaks Arabic so I could not speak to him directly. My colleague did and told the caretaker what was going on. My colleague hung up and told me that the caretaker was on his way.

Meanwhile, Dante ran to the 2nd floor to call the elevator. The elevator started to move. The display said that the elevator went to the 10th floor. As the elevator rose, Talyn's cries became softer and softer. Then they became louder again as the elevator returned. When it reached the ground, it still did not open. Deanna then told him to open the inner doors manually. When he did that the outer doors released somewhat and Deanna was able to open the door with her hand.

Talyn is glad to be out of that elevator.







Later, the caretaker arrived and checked the elevator. The elevator seemed to work fine after that. The reason that Talyn was in the dark is that whenever there is no activity in the elevator for a minute or two, the light turns off in order to save electricity.

Deanna and I had the kids take the stairs for the next couple of days. There was no arguments after what happened. It has now been a week since it happened and the kids do not take the elevator very often.

Now he takes the stairs instead.

humidity

Kuwait is a very dry place. This would seem self-evident as it is a desert, but I mean dry as in not humid. You see most of the Gulf region is very humid. Hot air takes water from the Arabian gulf and carries it on land. Kuwait is not humid as the wind blows from the desert to the sea and not vice-versa.

Although Kuwait is not humid in general, it is humid for one month during the year. This is that time of year.

It is miserable outside, but the saving grace is that everything is air-conditioned so it is not so bad. However, I wear glasses. If I walk from an air-conditioned room to the outside, my glasses immeadiately fog up. This is not too surprising given the humidity. What I find interesting is that they clear up just as fast in the dry air-conditioned air. Therefore as I go from store to store I become blind for about 2 minutes or until I reach the next store.

Short Term Apartment

One major decision we had to make was where to live. Now it is nearly impossible to choose a place that we would like long-term from overseas. Thus I thought it prudent to arrange for short-term housing.

Our short term housing consisted of a three bedroom apartment. Six days a week, not Friday, a cleaning crew arrives to straighten out the house. The apartment is furnished with IKEA furniture and it has a nice TV. A furnished apartment is key until our stuff arrives from the states.

















We are on the second floor, Apartment #102. In fact, we are in the apartment directly over the kids head. We are the two sets of windows on the left.







We park our rental car, the trailblazer in the back of the complex.
















One thing you will notice is that the apartment is all stone. There are stone walls and marble everywhere. The air conditioning is good as it keeps the apartment nice and comfortable.

Talyn and Dante playing DS in the living room.

Nyssa is looking at the Washer/Dryer. It actuallys washes and dries clothes in one machine!!
However, it does not dry all that much.



















This is view from the front of the apartment.

This is the view from the back.

Where is my Visa?

To visit Kuwait you need to have a visa. A visa is permission to enter the country for a specific amount of time. Visas typically need to be arranged ahead of time. However, Americans can get a visit visa after landing so it is very easy to do.

An easier way is to have the visas processed ahead of time and have a customs guide. I had a visa prepared weeks in advance, so no more work was needed. The rest of the family needed a visit visa. KCIC prepared a visit visa in advance for everyone and arranged for a customs guide. The customs guide met us at the airport gate and directed us to customs. He then went to the visa desk to pick up our prepared visas.

We hit a snag because Dante's visa was missing. Luckily I had a copy printed out of the visa; the company emailed copies ahead of time. The guide took the copy and then went through customs to the Mariott desk. The desk outside had the visa after all. The guide brought it back through customs and we went on our merry way. It is fascinating that an employee of a private company can have the security clearance to walk back and forth through customs.

Once we had the visa, we gave all of our passports and visas to the customs guide who handed it to the customs official to be stamped. After all 5 passports and visas were stamped, the papers were handed back to me and we proceeded to get our luggage.

I decided to get a porter with a big trolley to get our luggage. We had 10 large checked bags and 5 heavy carry-ons and there was no way we are getting out of there without help. It wasn't too bad as it only cost $6 to get the luggage to the hotel shuttle. The porter also helped put the bags through the x-ray machine as you need to xray all the bags before leaving the customs area.

Afterwards we had no troubles getting the bags to the shuttle, but it was difficult getting all the bags in the car. You see, this was not a large bus, but an SUV that seated 5. I sat in the front passenger seat and the rest of the family squeezed in the back.

Once we sat down, I took another inventory of our visas. I accounted for all the visas save one--Deanna's. I got out of the car and looked on the ground and I found nothing. I looked in the airport and I found nothing. I asked the hotel rep at the airport if he had seen anything, but he had not. He told me not too worry as her passport is already stamped and she is in the country. He was correct that there was nothing to worry about today, but at some point there would be a problem. In Kuwait you cannot leave the country without the visa.

There was nothing I could do at that point so we left for the hotel. We arrived in our room and slept a good deal. The flight arrived at 10pm and after customs and checking in we did not get into the room until nearly midnight so everyone was tired.

Deanna and I slept well until Talyn started making noise in the middle of the night. He did not sleep long before jet lag struck and he was wide awake. Apparently he was up for awhile before he was making noise. He said he spent quite a bit of time looking out the window. He was quite happy because he found a pizza hut. The words were in Arabic, but the logo was unmistakeable. Deanna lied down with him until he fell asleep.

I let them sleep until almost 10 then we had breakfast. We could not tarry too long as we had to check out by noon. After breakfast, we packed up again with all 15 bags and headed down to the front of the hotel where a couple of the people were waiting to whisk us to a short-term apartment.

As for the visa, it finally showed up. Someone came across it and passed it on to the hotel. It was waiting there when KCIC called around looking for it. At the moment, I have all the visas and everything necessary to get us settled here in Kuwait City.

Arrival

We left Chicago at 7:00 in the morning for at 10:50 flight. We reached Houston at 1:25 and we had a five hour layover until our 6:50 flight to Dubai.

Most of our stuff was being shipped and we were told it could take two months after we arrive before we would be reunited with our stuff. As a result, we had to pack enough stuff to last us those two months. As a practical matter, that should not be difficult, however in the age of identity theft I was leery of shipping sensitive material. Thus I had to carry a bulk of my papers as a carryon. When all was said an done we had 10 checked bags and 5 carryon bags.

We have never traveled with this much baggage. We have gone on several flights and I am a big proponent of traveling light. We took 4 carryons for a three week trip to Spain which is great when you have to go from hotel to hotel. The problem with not traveling light is the weight. As we are running from gate to gate making several connections, I was carrying far too much luggage. My arms and back were killing me everytime the kids wanted to walk around or get to the next gate.

After walking within the airport for what seemed like an eternity, we settled down in the American lounge for the long layover. We found a set of seats that were together and the kids played quietly on the ds while we waited. Dante was excited as I allowed him to open up Guitar Hero. I told him that he could not start playing the game until we were in the air going to Dubai, but I let him start a bit earlier. He grinned and started to play.

Eventually we boarded our flight to Dubai. This was the long flight--15 hours. I had been on international flights before where there is one TV and you are captive to the movie selection of the flight and that 8 hour flight seemed to drag on forever. Those memories haunted me as I thought this flight was going to be unbearable with three kids. That is partially the reason I will buy a new ds game and not open it until we are airborne. The new game seems to occupy them for a good chunk of the flight.

Luckily for us this was a newer plane and so the flying experience was much better. We flew emirates which has a young fleet. On the international flight each seat has a TV screen and each person can select any number of movies, tv shows, or games. This is a huge improvement as the long flight does not seem to take nearly as long as I feared. And soon, we found ourselves on approach to Dubai.

Dubai is building a new terminal so the normal jetways were not active. We had to board a bus to go from the plane to the terminal. We only had an hour and 50 minute layover and we were 20 or so minutes late due to a delayed weather-related takeoff in Houston. The bus added more time delay, so when we reached the terminal I was feeling the time pressure. We quickly went through security and started to walk in the terminal. I wanted to browse a bit in the shops in Dubai as they were quite extensive, but we did not have the time. Our gate was, of course at the very end of the concourse. I was busy herding the children to the other end of the airport all the while carrying about 500 lbs of luggage.

However, once we were there we had no problem getting to Kuwait. It is only a 90 minute flight so it is very easy after the 15 hour flight. The kids were doing quite well and soon we were on approach to Kuwait city.

Chicago-Houston-Dubai-Kuwait was quite a long flight with a lot of doubling back. You see to fly from Houston to Dubai you fly from Houston in the direction of Chicago and then over Iceland and then back down over Turkey and IRAQ (No problems here as we are flying over 30,00 feet) before you fly over Kuwait in order to get to Dubai. Unfortunately on long hauls, one cannot always avoid redundancies in flying.

Our long flight was over and now we are on the ground in Kuwait.

Our land adventure begins...

Bob and Becky

We have been very busy moving and I did not have computer access. Now we can start talking about our great adventure.

At the end of July, I left Chicago Equity Partners. At that time there was a long list of things to do. There was packing to be done, there was making provisions to sell our cars, and there was the daunting task of ensuring that we can take care of any problems in illinois from Kuwait. After all, we had not sold our home yet.

On the 31st of July, two days after my last day at work, we left to drive to see my brother Robert in Oaklahoma. The drive from Tinley Park to Ponca City takes 14 hours. For that reason, I like to break up the drive and stay at a hotel. On the way out, we left at 5 in the afternoon, so we only got to St. Louis before I decided to stop.

This drive was worse than before as it was compounded by the fact that we were driving two cars. My plan was to give our minivan to our brother. This meant that Deanna had to drive the minivan out while I followed in the Acura. Driving two cars meant that neither Deanna nor I could rest--we both had to drive.

Anyway, we stopped in St. Louis to rest in a hotel a block from the arch. In the morning, after breakfast, Deanna was ready to go. After all, I always preferred to get an early start when there was driving to be done. However, the kids saw the arch and they really, really wanted to go in. I was not in the mood to go into the arch, but we were so close that if we were going to go, this was the day.


















So up we went into the arch. Deanna stayed behind as the cars that go up the arch were too small for her tastes. One never spends too much time at the top of the arch, we got to the top, looked around and headed back down. There is a nice view, but it does not take long to see it. It took only 7 minutes for the kids to have their fill. Of course the journey up and down the arch is where the fun lies. As we were leaving the kids wanted a souvenir, but I was not about to buy some tchotke before a big move. We did get a nice photo which I hope to find someday in the 14 bags we shlepped to Kuwait.


Inside the arch

State House




Cardinal Stadium














At about 10:30 in the morning, we were off again. I did not mind too much as that was a quick pitstop. For the rest of the day we continued to drive until we reached my brothers house the next night.


We had a great time and my brother appreciated the car. I was happy to visit him as the kids always liked to play with the chickens and feed the cow. We were there when my sister-in-law went pig shopping. In a few months, they will be up to their eyeballs in bacon. There was also good timing of sorts as I was there as the washing machine gave out. Losing a washing machine was not a good thing, but if it had to go out it is better when I can help my brother move it into the house.

At the end of our visit we packed up and drove back to Illinois. Another such stage in our summer adventure.

Here is their new pig.

The boys playing games.
Deanna and Emma






Cheyanne and Abby

Out the back door of the farm.

Looking Back towards the house

It's a chicken