quick visit to Kuwait

My group tour ended in Basra, down in the south of Iraq and tantalisingly close to Kuwait, another country I hadn't yet been to.  So I decided that instead of flying out from Basra, I would cross the desert into Kuwait, spend just three days there (enough time to see the place as well as to make use of a decent internet connection and relax a little).  A friend was doing the tour with me, and we went together to Kuwait, taking a taxi to the border, the public bus between different border posts, and then another taxi to our hotel in Kuwait City.

As I was becoming used to in this part of the world, we were separated at the Kuwait entry point with women sent to a separate room.  There a lady took our passports to fill in her register.  She clearly neither spoke nor read English, and when she summoned me for the return of my passport I could see that she had painstakingly copied out BRITISH CITIZEN, from the third line of my passport, as my name in her register!!

From there I returned to the luggage-searching area, where we piled all of our luggage (from giant suitcases to tiny bags) onto a large flat platform.  Officials started to open the bags, and search through the contents, when the senior man spotted me.  He signalled to his assistant to put me and my bags onto the bus, without going through a search process.  So I sat and watched as the bags of all the other passengers were searched - and every single item of any foodstuff was confiscated, to the distress of the passengers.  I watched knowing that one of my bags contained two apples, two bananas, an orange and two cold slices of pizza...

Wondering why I was spared the process.  Sweet old white lady can't be smuggling food?  Certainly being older has some such advantages, as does being female (sometimes you see aggression melt away when an official realises he has to deal with a friendly-looking woman!) - and of course I am familiar with the 'white privilege' which has lived with me for many years.  Perhaps being British helps too?  I have been getting some wonderfully positive responses when I tell people where I'm from, even though the UK doesn't in all cases have a great history in the countries where I'm asked the question.  It seems that British 'soft power', and even perhaps the behaviour of previous British visitors to these places (the famous British politeness??), makes travelling relatively easy for Brits.

Similarly a couple of days later in Kuwait City I went to the Grand Mosque and luckily arrived some 15 minutes before the daily free guided tour.  I was ushered into a room to wait and offered tea and biscuits with the other three waiting tourists.  The lady serving the tea asked me "Americana?".  "Britania" I replied, and she responded with a beaming smile and made the heart shape with her hands; the other tourists, when they told her they were from the US, Germany and Nicaragua just got a polite smile.

Another observation in Kuwait was the relationship between religion and business.  You can see from the photo above that there are mosques ... but look how they are dominated by the banks and other business buildings (unlike, say, Istanbul, where the minarets of the mosques dominate the skyline).  & even the Grand Mosque, beautiful though it is - and open to both Sunni and Shia Muslims - is used for conferences and meetings more often than it is used for prayers.  Not that I am criticising that, but it was a surprise to see.