Koch'ang 
Back in August 2015, almost six months ago, a little black box from Grand Cinemas inscribed with “Try guessing what’s inside the box!” arrived on my doorstep. I was intrigued, and guessed it was an invitation to a movie premier or something. It was indeed an invitation to a movie premier, plus, there was a card inside with my name on it plus the words “VIP”. Read more »
From the blogger who read the world in one year and wrote a book about it comes this second and quite enticing dark thriller “Beside Myself” and once I set my eyes upon it I snatched it at once. I was lucky enough to get a signed copy of Ann Morgan‘s first book “Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer” because I was featured in it as the author of the book from Kuwait, quite an honour really but I will be talking about that book another time for the post have been ready and waiting for almost a year now! When reading Ann’s book, I liked what I read. When I read the description of Ann’s second book, I couldn’t wait to get my copy and as I finally sat down to read it, I had butterflies in my stomach. Read more »
For a while now I’ve been wanting to introduce you to two gorgeously cute individuals that I’m quite fond of. Those of you who have pets can relate to my state of adoration of my, well, nephews, Elsa and Olaf and no I’m not talking about the Disney characters here -they are named after them though, obviously!-. Elsa & Olaf are my brother and sister’s cats, they’ve had them ever since they were two tiny kittens and they are wrench-your-heart and pinch-that-cheek and bite-that-teeny-leg adorable! Read more »
How do I feel about this one?
I’m not really sure. I didn’t even want to pick it up at first because when I vaguely recall the prequel, me before you, I associate it with “distaste” for some reason. Then I grabbed it, because I just had to now didn’t I? Then I checked my review of Me Before You and it turned out I didn’t loathe it, I simply didn’t like the ending. Therefore, suddenly After You became the must read next book on my list, I just knew it would be and that’s telling me something about Me before you, right? Read more »
What makes you crave something? badly?
Me? Believe it or not its cartoons! Anime to be exact, the Japanese ones that we grew up watching. Whenever they gather around a dining table, those glittering dishes, specifically those steaming bowls of soups with a side of little bread. I was always hungry after watching an episode with food, and don’t get me started on Ninja Kabamaro’s chowmein insatiable appetite! Read more »
A while back, OK a few months back, I’ve had the pleasure of being invited for a “special” lunch cooked by the one and only Special Maryam, the amazing young chef who is makes the luscious bagels and melt-in-your-mouth fresh pastas of Maria Rustica and, the one behind the menu of the one and only Bao, which I’ve had the pleasure in sinking my teeth into several times and if you’ve read my review you’d know how much I’ve enjoyed it.Lucky me headed to a “secret” rooftop in Kuwait City, on a 31st floor overlooking a dazzling 360degrees view of Kuwait’s capital. Read more »
This is a tough one, as I’m not sure if I liked it because it was good or because I somehow related it to it or, if its even possible, I didn’t like it. I have mixed opinions so the defining factor would be its “pull”, which to be frank began waning as I went further into the story. Read more »
I have a shelf in one of my bookcases that I’ve dedicated to books that come in a special “collection”. It contains the surviving copies of my old Mickey magazines, my 1001 nights stories, copies of my own two Dathra books, my collection of Ikea catalogue dating back to the start of this century, and my collection of the annual Bazaar eating in Kuwait guides from 2008 onwards. Read more »
To start off let me clarify one thing, this is not an ad. I’m a vegetarian living in Kuwait, a foodie, and I love eating out. I do not believe in house help or enslaving humans in the name of housekeeping, therefore I have to fend for myself to find something to eat after working for eight hours a day and returning home by 4 P.M. I am not shy to say I love eating out, we are the capital of 8000+ restaurants after all! Why Kuwait isn’t the capital of the culinary world still is beyond me, an overdue movement that I hope should start soon. Read more »
This is book that I’ve found in the top-ten chart of Waterstones and, as I picked it up to read the description I knew right away that this the going to be my next read and that I am going to like it. Some books are just like that, you know from their idea that they are different, and good, and most of the time they do not disappoint and this one definitely did not. Read more »
I don’t want to write a cliched post, you know beginning of the year and resolutions of being healthy that may or mayn’t backfire by December but just to be clear this post is not related to any resolutions made for 2016. As a matter of fact, I started the year resolution-free and simply believed it was going to be “a good year” for a change only I’ve been continuously haemorrhaging money on various mini-problems for the past three weeks so there you go. Resolutions or not, I was simply bombarded while in the UK with endless social media ads to try a “free graze box” and that it was good for you. I dismissed it the first few times it popped up wherever I was then one day it clicked in, what’s the deal with that graze thing that is popping up everywhere? Read more »
Last Saturday, trudging through Heathrow Terminal 5 and grumbling, not wanting my vacation to end, I walked through Fortnum & Mason’s shop and headed straight to the tea rack, picking a box of Royal Blend tea bags to take home. While I was paying my eyes fell upon a stack of Fortnum blue boxes and a brochure announcing the “Hamperling”… Read more »
Last week, I attended my very first baby shower ever!
Ee wallah, I swear, first ever!
I grew up in Kuwait during the time when new mothers held their receptions at home, I don’t know about you but in my time a new baby meant the new mother stayed at her parents place in ground floor room and people arrived bearing gifts day in and day out for forty days straight, the Nifas period as its called in the Middle East. Then by the time my peers started becoming mummies, the baby reception was for a day or two at most in a private hospital or after the Nifas period in a baby-less celebration where the lady is all dressed up as a yummy-mummy and in either case, women arrive bearing gifts. Read more »
While reading “The Stranger” I wasn’t exactly indulging in its beautiful words or delicious sentences, but I pulled straight into the plot from chapter one in a way that left me no other choice but to continue. A blissful family man attending a boring suburban life even when suddenly a stranger whispers something about the man’s wives in his ear, a single sentence, but it was enough to turn the poor unsuspecting man’s life upside down and send him down a long dangerous path.
Who would have known that words could be so menacing? Read more »
After devouring and reviewing The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce, it was only natural I’d be picking up its sequel “The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy” which I’ve loved and enjoyed even more. Read more »
So, I’ve just put down this book and I feel a bit sorry that I’ve done so. I have this new ritual of getting a bunch of books and reading the first chapter of each in order to decide which one to start reading next. In the 13th tale case, I knew from page two that I very much wanted to continue on reading until the very last page and that once I do reach it, I will be buzzing with what ever I’ve read. My hunch was spot on. Read more »
What am I talking about? Receiving a package by the post? Is this really worth blogging about in 2015?
If you live in Kuwait then yes, it really is. Surprisingly, for a couple of decades the postal services in Kuwait have been really and truly unreliable in a way that broke your heart and left you scratching your head, it is the era of automated services after all. With the invention of online shopping, everyone had to find a way to shop and make sure their packages did arrive, enter Aramex mailboxes of 2003. For a while, Aramex provided a seamless splendid service with very reasonable prices, I even had magazine subscriptions delivered to my UK and US mailboxes and they’d arrive to Kuwait, censorship free, on a timely manner and would still cost less than their mutilated censored sisters that arrived midway through the month. Read more »
It’s me…
Its been a while I know. I come in here often, open up the post publishers, compose something, quit midway and sigh deeply. Then I spend the time until the next time I log in thinking only about the post I haven’t completed. I’m simply at loss at what to see.
I’m lost. Ever since I’ve hit the 35-years-old mark and I’ve been in sort of a panic, something akin to an early mid-life crisis where I am truly observing what I’ve achieved so far and, deciding that I’ve achieved absolutely nothing, am at loss at where I’ve went wrong and what am I going to do.
Its very much possible that I’ve bypassed half of the years of my life already. In 15 years I might be retired, in 25, a decade less than my current age, I’m going to be considered a “senior” citizen. In five year’s time I will not be considered that young nor youthful anymore. You get the idea.
Yet me, the girl who wanted to do everything, try everything, be everything, fill her entire life and colour her days with activities, am sitting on my couch brooding my days away. I don’t know what I want to do with my life anymore. I seriously don’t.
I’ve been let down by many. I’m not exactly successful at anything I am either even though I can give 100% and be perfect. Why? Sometimes its laziness, sometimes its being in the wrong place at the wrong time, sometimes its because I don’t have what society requires of you to succeed, something other than your ability or ethics.
Who am I? What do I want to do? I’m a female, I’m Kuwaiti, I’m married, I’m a computer engineer, and what else? Should there be something else? Am I behind, am I ahead already? What do I want? How do I behave? Do I give up? Should I invest in some unwarranted hope?
I know I need a vacation, and that long-overdue promotion. I need new scenery! New things to do, new faces to smile at, new places to visit, new food to taste. I want life, a vibrant and colourful and exciting life. I’m not ready to settle to whatever it is I’m supposed to be settling at when you are 40. I want to be a pilot, an archaeologist, an artificial intelligence researcher, a painter, a chef, a chocolatier, a coffee barista, write the next groundbreaking captivating novel, a dj, play the piano, sing, travel the world! I want to be thin again, my god if I could only be as skinny as I was, then go shopping until I’m broke for six months straight!
I want to be alive, I need to be free. One life time isn’t enough for all the things I want to do.
Thank you for making it here, apologies for inflicting my insecurities at you. Hopefully this means I can get over this post now its published and get back to blogging normally. One day I hope I can look back at this post and laugh at how confused I was, little 35 years old Nadooya 
P.S. Is it possible that I’m the only person on earth who doesn’t like Adele’s new hit song? Well, I don’t, I think its boring but that’s just me.
Book Review: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
By danderma | October 16, 2015
In a change of all the war-related novels I’ve somehow found myself reading lately, I picked up this book with a bright-yellow cover and nothing historical or war related story line. It is an intriguing one, it seemed, for its supposed to tell the story of Rosemary, a girl who lost her sister Fern when they were little and when she grew up she finds out more about what happened to her sister, the plot played at a mystery surrounding the little girl’s disappearance and involving both girls father and an experiment he was conducting on his girls, the two children. Read more »
How incredibly cute are those little green olive-like berries?
They don’t look like much now, do they? I myself wouldn’t have given them a second glance, they don’t strike me as that interesting or boring but this is one very fact-affirming moment in life where the inside is what indeed that matter and not the visible cover. Once you cut those little berries in half you will find a little teeny kiwi inside! Yes, kiwi, complete with miniature little black seeds and all! Don’t believe me? Look! This is the grape sized olive-like little green berry… Read more »
You read the cover of the book and you know you are in for a treat, for whatever words will come must tell a complex tale of love and loss. One day in Rome during WW2 young Chiara Ravello was about to flee the war only to come upon a family being hoarded for concentration camps. In one life-changing moment, Chiara manages to save the 7-years-old little David from the fate awaiting his family by claiming he was her nephew, and from that moment on her journey with the little boy begins. Read more »
Have you been to Bao?
I have, and then I have again and again, and somehow even though there is one savoury bao that I can have on the menu I keep craving that bao, the pillow softness texture you bite into before you are met with the crunchy fried exterior of the mushroom. Bao, which my auto correct keeps correcting to Boa, is one of Kuwait’s hottest eateries right now and it does deserve all the attention indeed. Read more »
Close your eyes for a moment after you read this paragraph andimagine a point far far away in the future when you are as old in age as you’d think you’d live to be, how about a 100-years-old? Everything is in the hands of god of course, but let’s imagine that somehow you did live to join the centenarian club. How do you think you will feel, health-wise, if Allah granted you to live that long? White hair and lots of wrinkles of course yes that’s a given, but what about your health? Read more »
Over a breakfast scented with the aromas of freshly brewed good coffee and just baked homemade baguettes, I found my fingers trailing the latest stack of books that I’ve brought from the UK and hovering several time over the “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry”. Its not a new book per say, its been there for a few years and sold over 2 million copies apparently but its because of its sequel -that I also bought- that I found out about it and will review it here when I’m done. Let’s just say I was intrigued enough to choose this book from the more-than-few that I have in my bookshelves waiting to be read and I’m glad I did. Read more »
My 35th birthday was on the very first day of Eid! Therefore, I got a lot of people to celebrate with me :p Now I’ve received several nice gifts from friends and family and I thank each and everyone of them for their continuous love and support throughout the years, I’m blessed to have people who celebrate the day I was brought into their lives and this year the celebration yielded not one, but two different cameras as birthday gifts! You know how you don’t know you wanted something until you actually got it? That was the case with each camera, I never knew how much joy receiving the them brought me until they arrived! Read more »
