Kuwait As I See It From The Air

Well, yesterday I got to fly down to Kuwait City in the daylight. That was pretty cool. We took basically the same loop that I did on Sunday, only this time I could see everything around me. Kuwait City looks a lot like most other big cities I've been to in the U.S. with a couple of differences.

First, everything is brown. They had parks with playgrounds and benches and such but no grass would grow out here so the ground is just dirt. The only green that was to be seen came in the form of some bushes and trees that people had planted.

Second, there do not seem to be any single-family dwelling neighborhoods. None. Every residential area that I saw was made up of apartment buildings. Some of them were quite nice, and others weren't, but nowhere did I see what looked like what we Americans think of as regular houses. The apartment buildings here seem to follow the style I saw in Bolivia quite a bit. That is, they were multi-story buildings built around a central courtyard. Some of the nicer ones had fountains in the middle of the courtyard. Out in the northern desert I saw a couple of very large...I guess the closest thing I can think of is a ranch...where there was a very large house and then a couple of acres of beautifully landscaped land. One of the properties we flew over had about 3 acres covered in what appeared to be very plush grass and a little man-made pond in the middle. The entire area was surrounded by walkways and there was even a little island in the pond that had a gazebo on it. It was gorgeous! Especially since it was surrounded by some of the most barren desert you can imagine.

In my opinion, Kuwait City is a lot like most other cities I've seen in that I prefer it at night. There's something almost mystical about a city when the lights come on. Everything sparkles. The ugly scars that civilization leaves behind are mostly invisible. Look at pretty much any city and you'll see the same thing. No matter how beautiful it is during the day, it gets even prettier at night.