February Holidays

Kuwait was just kind enough to give me a three-day weekend. Which is twice the usual weekend for my company.

On the down side, there are no more holidays before I leave on April 4th. That means 30 days of work between now and then—bad news for Donald Duck and Dik-Diks—so I won't get any more chances to investigate the surrounding countries. That's probably it for excursions to Egypt, UAE, and Bahrain. From here on it, it's excursions to the mall or the supermarket.

To what did I owe the honor of this three-day weekend?

Well, first it was Friday. Friday is our Sunday, the day that everyone gets off. Religious people go to the mosque. Others go to the mall or stay home and color comic books.

Then it was National Day. That's the day the Kuwaitis celebrate the creation of the nation, which happened in 1961. I read somewhere that there are fireworks on National Day (like in the USA on Independence Day) but I missed them because I was sitting on the bus home from the airport at that time.

Sunday was Liberation Day. That's the day the Gulf War ended in 1991, when the seven months of Iraqi occupation were over. The good news is that when Saddam Hussein's army invaded, it was in the height of summer, so many people were vacationing in cooler climes, a sensible tradition in the Gulf. The bad news is that of course plenty of people were not out of town, and they had to live through the violence, torture, rape, and looting that began on August 2, 1990.

On Liberation Day, there are celebrations, but the only celebrating I did in 2006 was when I turned off my laptop and went to sleep after agonizing over the East Africa Express chapter of Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik all day.