Days like yesterday make me long for Wal-Mart. I spent the better part of 2 hours wandering around various markets and shopping areas here in Kuwait city shopping for of all things, laundry detergent. My hotel being a 5-star, charges outrageous prices for all of the little services such as laundry. It’d cost me almost $3.50 for them to wash a T-shirt, $0.75 for a pair of socks, it’s crazy. But in the crew lounge that they reserve for airline flight crews, there is a washer and dryer so I went out to find some detergent.

I started by asking my new friends, the Filipino girls who pretty much run everything at the hotel and they all looked at me funny when I said I wanted to do my own laundry. Nonetheless they directed me to try a few certain markets and places so I wandered off to try my luck. Everywhere that I went I was greeted with the same skeptical looks and quizzical questions from shopkeepers. “You want what? Why do you want it? Are you sure you want it? What will you do with it?”

Finally I found a big box of Tide for about $5 and took it back to the hotel. A couple of the girls came over as I walked in the door, they were smiling their big Filipino smiles and then when they saw that I had indeed bought laundry soap, they all started chattering excitedly among themselves in Tagalog and pointing at it. They seemed rather surprised that the overpaid American was actually going to go through with it and do his own laundry. I’ve just been wondering over and over again when I see things, “What the hell is wrong with this place?”

It’s not all bad though, there was a very exciting wedding the other night. I’d never seen an Egyptian wedding, it was crazy! And because I was dressed nicely and had been chit-chatting with a lot of the guests hanging around the lobby, they invited me along. It was a really charged atmosphere with a band consisting of 5 or 6 guys beating these different kinds of drums, a guy on a soprano sax, and another guy playing what looked like sawed off clarinet with a trumpet bell. But together it all blended into that magical Middle Eastern sound as they wandered around the lobby with all of the party guests loudly sounding their traditional Bedouin “trilling” that they do. Quite the experience.