“Do we really want to go out in that?” I asked Matt, pointing at the darkening clouds and the flat blobs of rain splatting down on the road in front of us.
“Why not?” boomed the 61 year old Texan in his baritone voice, “It’ll be an adventure”
So off we went to Souk Salah, the Weapon’s Market. As awesome and horrific as that sounds, it’s a historic name for Kuwait City’s oldest market, and in fact has no weapons in sight. I was pleased to discover this when a friendly local suggested it early in the day. And if my American counterpart was game for getting a cab to some far flung part of the city and exploring I certainly wasn’t going to back down!
The aforementioned rain put paid to our plans to film the city (for the fourth time) today, and so off we set. Our adventure got off to a somewhat shaky start, as we first had to go to a money exchange to get Matt’s dollars turned into local Dinars, at which point he’d realised he’d left his glasses in the hotel. Our Bangladesh taxi driver then took us to Souk Saliah - which was at the wrong end of town. As it turns out, the money exchange was in the Souk Salah itself, and so we set off retracing our steps once again.
Memories of Egypt and some stereotypical ideas made me expect a buzzing bazaar, ride with shouting locals and hordes of vendors trying to lure you into their shops and to see the latest alabaster models at their stalls. Nothing could be further from what i’d expected. Covent Garden is more down market and pushy, and for the first two hours we had the shops to ourselves. Not once did anyone try and lure us into a shop, nothing but polite straightforwardness. It was brilliant! That’s not to say there weren’t the typical characters and friendly nutters you’d hope to find at a large market.
"I love Americans", hopefully he likes us brits too...
After a spot of shopping and explaining to Matt how wearing local thawbs (full length tunics) would make us look like “twats” or “twots” as he insisted on pronouncing it, we stopped for tea. The locals were friendly, everyone in the tea parlour greeting us and smiling. And before we had time to pay at the end, we discovered a local had treated us to the drinks on him. He wanted nothing in exchange, he was simply being hospitable.
This old dude was too awesome to not photo.
Some further shopping and a bit of bartering later we headed back to the hotel on foot and got thoroughly lost in the process. Spotting a Costa Coffee house we decided to have a spot of coffee and see if we could ask someone to point us in the right way. Before we got inside a friendly trio of locals spoke to us “Hello, where are you from?”, “Ah American! English! Thank you, thank you for freeing Kuwait” he went on to say after we’d introduced ourselves. We then ended up treated to more coffee at our hosts insistence “No thank you, you saved us from Saddam. George Bush very good. Mrs Thatcher very good.”
The best thing about travelling is meeting open minded interesting people. We chewed the fat with perfect strangers for the best part of two hours. We laughed at each other’s jokes, shared stories, talked politics and religion (both Matt’s favorite subjects), and I even managed to sneak in my Top Gear story - much to the amazement of my new friend Sala, a big fan of the show.
And they even helped me dress up to like like a twot....
Sala, Ben of Arabia, Abdul and Nayve
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment