Kuwait

May 2–4, 2008

Kuwait is very strict about booze—it’s not sold anywhere, and you can’t bring in your own. My advice to Russian travelers: fill a water bottle with vodka and put it in your checked luggage. There isn’t much to do here, and neighboring Bahrain also has beaches, but without the extra restrictions, so Russians don’t go to Kuwait.

The airport has a special room where modest Muslim women can reveal their faces to female passport control officials. This is for those who don’t normally take their veil off in public.

Life in Kuwait isn’t generally all that different from life in neighboring oil countries: the locals are wealthy slackers, and all the work is done by disenfranchised migrants. The Kuwaiti dream is illustrated in this ad for a 103-inch plasma TV: men sitting around in a room looking at a picture of a yacht in high definition.

The vendors at the market laying fish out on the ice? Migrants.

Water towers live in herds.

It’s sweltering hot outside. Every car has a fire extinguisher in the front. For overheated people, there are drinking fountains on every corner.

And traffic signal equipment is kept under a canopy so it doesn’t explode.

And if a utility box is immune to heat strokes, it’s simply protected with bollards. You can destroy your car, but don’t you dare harm public property.

Every important section of road is fenced off in some way.

They know what they’re doing. The drivers are terrible here. This signpost with a “Pedestrian Crosswalk Ahead” sign has experienced this firsthand.

And here’s the crosswalk sign itself. Of British pedigree. With a person who has feet and a 100-watt head.

An original traffic light with a billboard next to it urging people to buckle up. Never before have I seen a schematic depiction of a driver in such detailed national garb.

The authors of the PSAs don’t know the difference between a car and an airplane seatbelt, judging by this billboard:

All the lane markings are made of plastic caps here. You can actually feel the line when you’re switching lanes. The arrows are simply painted, of course.

All the curbs in the country are painted yellow and black.

There’s enough yellow and black paint in the country for everyone.

A local post box (also British, like in Trinidad and Tobago, but painted a different color).

In Kuwait, thanks to the visual overdose, I finally understood one very important thing about Middle Eastern psychology.

Islam forbids any depictions of God, but modern people find not having an image to worship very difficult. So instead of God, Middle Eastern countries all mass-produce portraits of kings, shahs and presidents (and their fathers for good measure). This is something that’s shared by the Emirates and Chechnya, Qatar and Syria.

No one knows what Allah looks like, but everyone knows what the Emir looks like. His portrait hangs at the entrance to every shop except the butcher’s (for some reason).

Single, double and triple portraits of different sizes, with different backgrounds, of different quality—they’re everywhere. Muslims find it hard to live without an image.

The best memory of the country ended up being a bus schedule sign shaped like a bus (compare to the garbage truck sign in Venezuela). They even drew the wheels correctly, which is completely unnecessary for such a symbolic depiction. You can tell it was made with love.