One Hour From Iraq (by car)

After experiencing more than enough of Bor-rain, as Bahrain is known in the Middle East, we boarded a plane that evening and landed in Kuwait, specifically Kuwait City (are these people original or what?). You may know Kuwait from such important events as the invasion by Iraq, Operation Desert Storm, and the burning of oil fields by the Iraqi troops. Those little tid bits occurred almost 20 years ago - before most of the students I met at schools were even born - so Kuwait has had plenty of time to rebuild and the country is very modern, and extremely wealthy. Actually, Kuwait is the third richest country in the world and it shows, almost all of the cars were extreme luxury, homes along the Gulf shore were massive, the freeways were modern, and Kuwait City was a little Dubai-esque with the unique and sheer number of new skyscrapers under construction.

Many of you who have come to expect postcards will be disappointed because there are will be none arriving from Bahrain and Kuwait. I did my best, embarked on an exhaustive search, and I believe these two countries do not have postcards - and they really don't need them, there is almost zero tourism in these places. So, you will have to enjoy images from the blog and await postcards from Amman and Jerusalem. With that in mind, as exciting as being one hour from the Iraqi border sounds, it wasn't and there wasn't much fun site-seeing in Kuwait, so I thought I would take this time to paint a picture of the school visits in these countries.

In the last post I outlined a typical day, and it usually involves a fair amount of time spent on a bus, riding from school to school, and there are discussions, napping, or picture snapping...here is an image of a typical bus ride:

Now that you have that visual, when we pull up to a school we usually get off the bus, walk in, and hang out as we wait for the counselor to then take us on a walk to what seems like the opposite end of their campus to the location of the school college fair (usually a gym or atrium). We set-up our tables and then the students come in and sit down in the middle of the room. Our tour leader does a brief intro and then the kids approach our tables to discuss, er, ask questions about admission. These pics are from the Kuwait Creative Academy, an all-girls school:

In this setting the most common questions asked at EVERY SINGLE visit this time around include:

> Do you have Engineering? (no breath) Do you have Business?

> What's the minimum GPA?

> Do I have to take the SAT? (pronounced sat, they do not say s-a-t)

> What's the minimum SAT?

> Where's this school located?

> Is it cold there?

> Do I have to live on campus freshmen year?

If a student is interested in something other than engineering or business you want to do a little celebratory dance because it is so rare. You'll also notice the questions are very matter-of-fact, the initial interest is not based on campus life, sports, or even the city or location (their primary concern is that it does not snow there - apparently they like the snow at Ski Dubai but they do not want to see it on their college-of-choice lawns). As the students move around the room shuffling from table to table they accumulate a number of brochures and business cards, which leads me to the...

College fair walk of shame - this is when you have to return another college reps' brochure or business card because it was left on your table or on the floor, due to the haste of these students. You have no idea who left it, why they left it, or if they meant to, but you return it.

Oh, and after this school we visited the American School of Kuwait where Vanderbilt was given attention due to statements like: "This is the school near Hannah Montana's hometown!" I guess that is better than the school in Oman where some very traditional looking Arab high school boys were excited Vandy was there because of our name being featured on Gossip Girl. My face probably revealed my surprise, just not what I was expecting from boys in dishdashis (ankle-length white shirt) and traditional Arab headdress. The Middle East never ceases to amaze.