Saturday, December 14, 2013

A night out in Kuwait

It all started with a genuine Kuwaiti dinner.



The Mister and our friends went out to a local restaurant for a sampling to the national dish of Kuwait: Machbouse. It's very similar to the Saudi national dish (Kebsa) in that it is a meat-and-rice dish.



One difference is the little stack of lentils, raisins, and cardamom you can see next to the chicken. Our Kuwaiti friend taught us the authentic way of eating machbouse. You gotta dig in there and eat it with your hands.


I don't think I quite mastered the technique, but it was a really good time getting my hands messy and watching as the Mister tried to keep the rice out of his beard.


After dinner we went to a local school to watch a British Christmas theater tradition: the Pantomime.

No, it's wasn't a full-length feature show done entirely silently (though that would have been interesting to see attempted). No, a pantomime is a British theater term for a holiday comedy show that features a woman playing the lead boy and a man playing the lead female with lots of topical humor and innuendo in between.



It was a very cultural experience. British theater with a middle-eastern audience. We spent a few of the scenes looking at the back of fellow audience members' heads and watched in horror as children ran across the stage and played with the keyboard during intermission.

Theater audiences in this region have a ways to go, but I'm glad we get performance opportunities like this!

Then I came home to get a little FaceTime with my sweet niece on her one-month birthday.



Vicariously yours,


So...this is a thing...



This Mister and I have had fresh-from-the-camel camel milk before. It was pretty gross. So you can understand why my initial reaction to seeing bottled camel milk in our local grocery store. It's probably not a fair reaction. Afterall, the camel milk we drank was totally un-homogenized, un-pasteurized...it was probably a miracle that we didn't get some sort of virus or pathogen from the milk.


Fresh milk. That's no strange, right? Camelicious. Creative name. Fresh is generally a good thing when you're referring to dairy products...


But if you look reeeally closely at the date flavored camel milk, you see that THIS variety is pasteurized. Which begs the question: does that mean the fresh milk is not pasteurized?!

Yikes.

Vicariously yours,