Saturday, February 15th - Olympics, and Valentine's Day

My work week was short; I didn't go in on Sunday and Monday due to a cold. I started feeling better by midweek and feel 100 % now. Jacqui has been tutoring everyday, even today. She enjoys it as it's keeping her busy (and the money is good).

We have been watching the Olympic Games on TV - can't really watch online as CBC is limited to Canadian territory, and NBC to the States. Olympics aren't very big in Kuwait; most of the people we talk to don't even know that the games are going on. We managed to find three different stations that carry a fair amount of events live as there is only one hour difference between us and Sochi (two of the stations are in Arabic and the third one is in English). The arabic stations are pretty cool. There is only one announcer, sitting in a studio somewhere as he seems to do all the events. It's kind of cool to watch a hockey game in arabic. He gets excited doing the play by play but we don't have a clue of what he's saying. The feed is coming directly from Olypic Broadcast Services, so there are no commercials either. Between periods of hockey games, we see the Zambonis go by and the cameras just go around showing people in the crowd. It's like sitting in the stands at the game itself! But they are also unpredictable - they just switched from hockey (Russia - USA) after the first period to a soccer game. Crap. No more coverage for now as the other two stations are showing camel races and some kind of horses' competition.

On Valentine's day, we were invited for dinner, with another couple, at one of Jacqui's colleagues' place. They have a beautiful apartment with a big patio, overlooking the gulf. All six of us sat there for a while and there was still lots of room for more people. We sure couldn't do that at our place. The meal was very good, and they also had some homemade beverages, which were also very good. It felt like a normal outing, like something we would do back in Canada. It was very nice.

By this time next week, we will be in Sri Lanka. We are leaving Thursday night and getting to Colombo on Friday morning. It's a two hour drive to our resort, which means we should be there late morning. We are staying for a week; we are really looking forward to it.

For friends and family in Ontario: enjoy your long weekend!