House of Mirrors

On a hot afternoon back in the middle of June I was fortunate enough to go on a tour to the House of Mirrors here in Kuwait.


(50 degrees Celsius (122F) outside at 5:29pm...)

Calling it the House of Mirrors is certainly no joke - the ENTIRE house is covered in mosaics made of pieces of mirror:


(House of Mirrors - front view and main entrance)


(House of Mirrors - front view. An 'Art Museum' it certainly is!)


(House of Mirrors - the main entrance)

Now, before you think this is part of an amusement park or some art project, let me just say that this is a private home (!) and the lady who transformed it from a typical Kuwaiti house to this House of Mirrors still lives there. Her name is Lidia Al Qattan - an Italian lady who has lived in Kuwait for decades and is the widow of the famous (at least within Kuwait) Khalifa Al Qattan. He was a pioneer artist and in the 1960s he created the school of circulism.

What mostly attracts people, though, is the chance to have a look inside this spectacular house:


(Wall decorations in the sitting room - note that the mirrors form not only animals but also Arabic writing)

Lidia Al Qattan didn't limit herself to a few wall decorations - in fact there seems to be no limits whatsoever to what she decorated with mirrors - including the ceiling and the fan:


(Mirror decorations on the walls and ceiling - and the fan - in the sitting room)

In between the many pieces of mirror there has been made space for some of the art work that the couple has produced over the years - including this portrait of Lidia by her husband...


(Lidia Al Qattan by Khalifa Al Qattan - framed by mosaics of mirror)


(A door in the sitting room - covered in mirrors)

Lidia got the idea of decorating her house with mosaics of mirror while her husband was away for an art exhibition - apparently she started with a piece of furniture and when her husband came back and said that he liked how it looked covered in pieces of mirror, she continued over the years until most of the house and furniture was covered...

Kitchen is pretty much covered as well (I guess she is saving the fridge project for a rainy day :)):


(Kitchen covered in mirrors)


(Kitchen covered in mirrors - fish, crabs, apples, grapes - nothing that cannot be made in mirror mosaic!)

Another view of the sitting area - with its leopard printed sofas where she invites her guests to sit and hear the life story of her and her husband, their art and not least the house while extending traditional Kuwaiti hospitality in the form of cake and drinks:


(Sitting room)

Like I said - there are no limits. Electrical socket? No problem!


(Mosaic on the electrical socket - and a fish mosaic, sitting room)

Most of the rooms have a theme - and this room is the Zodiac Hall with planets, galaxies, stars - she has put those little rubber stars that glow in the dark on the ceiling and her art work (the two round shapes in the picture) glow as well! Quite an experience. It is Lidia Al Qattan in the picture:


(Lidia Al Qattan explaining the room and about to hit the light switch leaving us all under the stars)

A few more examples of the extent of her project:


(Door phone covered in mosaic)

Even the bathroom was not spared (and let me again remind you that this is her private home!) - you better like the look of yourself in the morning if you do a bathroom like this!


(Tissue box in the bathroom)


(The shower, bathroom)


(The toilet itself, bathroom)

After everyone had taken turns to squeeze into the bathroom (wouldn't want to miss that!) she showed us more of her dedicated rooms - a lot of them focusing on the universe, galaxies etc. but still mixed with animal motifs and inscriptions from the Qur'an.


(View of the ceiling)


(A decorated cabinet standing on a decorated floor...)


(Patterns, circles, birds, Qur'an inscriptions, planets - and they are all connected in her mind and her thoughts behind the room)


(Bird mosaic - and one of those glow-in-the-dark stars)

Lidia doesn't just show you around her house - she tries to take you on a journey. All the rooms have meditative music, many of them incorporate some "show in the dark", glowing stars, glowing art, colored light...


(Colored light reflecting in the mosaics during one of the journeys...)


(Lots of colored light to add another dimension to the mosaic)


(A light switch and some more bird mosaic)

Here's a view of the sitting room I showed before - taken from the hall. The neon lights - and of course the fact that the walls have been painted blue - give the whole place the bluish shine.


(Sitting room)

Her library is decorated as well:


(Library)

If you look closely, the edges of the book shelves are covered in mirror mosaic and she certainly skipped no corners: behind the books there is mosaic as well!


(Mirror covered book shelves along with family pictures)


(From the courtyard)


(The courtyard and house facade with Arabic inscriptions and more animals)


(From the courtyard - it's about life-size)


(Front door)

Part of the tour also included a look into the first floor galleries - where her and her husband's art is on display. This room is dedicated to Khalifa Al Qattan (and therefore not covered in mirrors) and his accomplishments:


(Khalifa Al Qattan's room - with portraits, medals, photographs of him shaking royal hands)


(Khalifa and Lidia Al Qattan)

Some of Khalifa Al Qattan's art work on display:


(By Khalifa Al Qattan)


(By Khalifa Al Qattan)


(By Khalifa Al Qattan)

I'm not sure which one of them did these ones incorporating traditional Arabic objects but I believe it was her:



Much of Lidia Al Qattan's art work is also on display (and for sale):


(By Lidia Al Qattan)


(By Lidia Al Qattan)


(By Lidia Al Qattan)

Fancy a somewhat different candle holder?


(By Lidia Al Qattan)

It comes in a large version as well:


(By Lidia Al Qattan - oversized candle holder sculpture...)

As another part of the 'journey through her house' Lidia has built this room that also glows in the dark. It is really something else - spacey! The walls are made of a decorated fabric that velcro will stick to (I guess that explains why the flying skateboards stay on). Visitors are encouraged to throw the velcro-backed decorated triangles seen below at the wall and try and make them stick...


(Another glow-in-the-dark room - the triangles to the left are the ones you can throw at the wall and make stick)


(Close-up of the skateboard/space ship/UFO thing)

And last but not least another relaxation room (you can almost hear the meditative music) full of lit-up art, colored glass and the works:


(Relaxation room)

I certainly cannot imagine living in a house like this day in and day out - but you have to respect her for going after her vision/dream and completing it. In Kuwait it is extremely rare to let strangers into your house so the fact alone that she invites people in to see it is commendable (and probably only permissible since her husband has passed away). I truly appreciated the opportunity to meet Lidia and to see her house and am very grateful for her hospitality - but boy what a surreal place!!

Good Karma My A**

I had hoped that this post would be about how much we enjoy finally having a ‘real home’ in our new apartment and with some pictures as I had promised.

Unfortunately this is not the case…As much as we enjoyed the first two months of February and March the month of April has been quite terrible so far.

This blog was not intended for complaining but since my other posts have been positive, I think I am allowed one complaining one… To begin at the beginning we managed to move all our things from our temporary apartment to the new one and with the help of 2 good friends and their car the move was done in a short morning.

That same day – 1 April – I made the mistake of waiting for a taxi outside in the sun and ended up waiting 50 minutes – when I got back home the maintenance guys had been in our apartment and to be friendly had put the air condition on 20 degrees Celsius (68F). That shift in temperature always makes me ill (we had the same problem in China where the outside is hot much of the year and the malls are not cool but downright cold). Sure enough I got ill – flu-like and with fever and I just felt totally miserable for 8 days. This also meant that Ks birthday on 2 April ended up with me lying on the sofa most of the day and the two of us sharing a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken in front of the tv instead of going to the Italian restaurant we had planned to give a try… poor him.

Fast forward to the weekend of 8/9 April when I am beginning to feel better and ready to get unpacked in our new apartment. We wake up on the Friday with some really annoying red, itching bites on our bodies. We figure they might be from mosquitoes that have come in during the evening when we had the windows open. On Saturday we wake up with even more bites and spray the entire apartment with insect spray and evacuate for 3-4 hours to let it work. Come Sunday (which is a working day here) we are both covered in bites that are itching like crazy.


(A few of K's many bed bug bites)

We now know that it cannot possibly be mosquitoes and slowly begin to realize that it must be bed bugs. (For those of you who want to know more check Wikipedia on bed bugs – but don’t say I didn’t warn you!). We had had bloodstains on our sheets the week before and together with the characteristics of the bites it had to be the bed bugs (the itching comes from an allergic reaction to the saliva they add to the bite to stop the bleeding). In short they are nasty little animals – ranging from almost invisible when they are young to about a quarter of a pinkie nail in size when they are grown – they hide mainly in wood and textiles and come out during the dark of the night to suck blood from the people sleeping. They then lay a bunch of eggs and the problem multiplies. Since they like to live close to their food source they typically nest in the wood frame of the bed or nearby nightstands or in the mattress itself (hence their name). The problem with getting rid of them is that they hide during the day, they lay their eggs in cracks and crevices that you cannot see and they can survive for up to 18 months without food (blood). We still don’t know the exact source of the bed bugs - our apartment is a furnished one and some furniture came from their storage in the basement, some from another apartment where a tenant moved out and a few things were new (or at least newly bought). There has probably been one hiding in our bed (the master bed had a big wooden frame) but we didn’t think to check as everything looked like it was in good condition and not too old – but apparently this is not the first time that the landlord is trying to save money by not replacing things that ought to be replaced…

Since we were pretty sure it was bed bugs (we found their small light brown skins in our bed – they shed it as they grow bigger…) we initiated our own ‘Operation Desert Storm War On The Bed Bugs’. To make a loooong story somewhat shorter here is how our days have been – in highlights - since then.

Keep in mind that there are many parties involved here – the owner of our apartment is a Kuwaiti man who is not really involved. Then there is the land lord – a right hand man of the owner (who tries to make people believe he is Kuwaiti but is in fact Iranian) who comes to the building each day to buzz people around and shout at Miss M. Down by the entrance of our building is an office where Miss M (a lady from the Philippines) is sitting during office hours – she is from a separate company that is hired to manage the building (paper work, showing people around, taking care of tenants’ requests etc.) along with two Indian guys from the same company (maintenance guys/handy men and night guards).

Sunday 11 April: After finding the bed bug skins in our bed I go into the kitchen and accidently scratch my upper arm on a sharp edge on one of our kitchen cupboards – a nice long bleeding cut. I then get a phone call from a Kuwaiti friend (more about that later) about some misunderstanding at a cultural center I regularly go to and I have to explain – in simple English terms – that it is a misunderstanding and that they should not expel the person they wanted to expel thinking that she had offended me based on my nationality.

I then convince Miss M that we need a professional pest control company to spray our apartment ASAP. After much back and forth with her company’s head office they book the pest control to come spray within an hour or so as they are anyway in our area. I go to pack up some things in the apartment. After more than 1.5 hours they have not come. I go to Miss M’s office again to make her follow-up – they then say they will come at 3 pm. I decide to start washing and tumble drying our bed sheets to kill any remaining bed bugs – heat treatment at above app. 50 degrees Celsius (122F) is the only thing that is sure to kill all stages of life (some are resistant to the poison so that’s not even a certain method). As I have washed all our bed sheets and towels our dryer breaks down. The maintenance guy splits it apart and tries to repair it but cannot and so I pack all our wet sheets in a big plastic bag… Just what I needed.

Come 3 pm the pest control is still not there – Miss M starts calling them again and they do not pick up their phone. After more than an hour of back and forth she finally gets a hold of them and they say that they will come the following morning because they are now somewhere close to the Saudi Arabian border and cannot make it before 5 pm when they are off. Again a lot of back and forth – me insisting that we will not sleep one more night in that apartment and that they will get our hotel bill if that is the solution. We try to find another company without luck (no yellow pages here) and a million other possible solutions. I finally ask her to call them again and ask what their fee is for working outside normal hours (had not occurred to me before…) and very quickly they say that for KD 15 ($52 / €38 /Kr. 286) they will come at 5.30 pm.

So there you have it – I have paid my very first bribe ever and I hated it!!! I know it is common in many cultures but for me it is really something out of the ordinary, against all my principles and very unpleasant. On a funny side note, though, they even gave me a fully official receipt for my bribe!?!?!


(Official invoice for my KD 15 bribe...)

So they finally come and spray after 5.30 pm and we then need to stay out of the apartment for a minimum of 4 hours – the poison they spray is absolutely terrible! It is quite lucky we do not have a neighbor at the moment because he would have had to evacuate as well. I meet up with K in a mall close to his office and we stay until 10pm when we can go back and ventilate. The smell is still awful but after ventilating we decide to sleep there (in the guest room). In hindsight that was a bad idea – I woke up several times during the night and felt the poison in my throat and lungs.

Monday 12 April: We woke up with no bites – but as they can take up to 9 days to start itching that is no reassurance. I went out for lunch to celebrate a friend’s birthday and when I came back I found a live bed bug in the guest bedroom where we had slept – so apparently the poison had either not worked or not been sprayed with enough care.

My dryer had not yet been taken to the repair shop because they needed authorization from the landlord who usually says no a couple of times before he says yes… If Miss M sends it to be repaired without the landlord giving his approval first, he will demand that she pays for the repair. I sent the bed covers to dry cleaning and I then started the big project of washing all of our clothes on 60 degrees. One load full takes about 2.5 hours and our washing machine is quite small… When the clothes is dry we give it another 1.5 hours or so in the dryer to be sure (that is, when we have a dryer). I again denied to sleep in the apartment since we knew for sure that there were still live bed bugs and after a lot of back and forth between her office, the land lord, her boss (who K also had to call directly and complain to get things going faster) they finally suggested that we can borrow a new mattress that they happened to have at Miss M’s company and sleep in an empty apartment on the 16th (top) floor. Since that night we have not slept in our own apartment – come bedtime we go to the 16th floor and sleep on the mattress – and go back down again in the morning for showering etc.


(Our borrowed mattress in the 16th floor empty apartment)

Unrelated to this post, the apartment on the 16th floor has a really nice bathroom - talk about room with a view.


(16th floor apartment bathroom with big windows)


(The view over Salmiya as seen when you are sitting on the toilet!)

Tuesday 13 April: I had bought a set of screwdrivers the day before, determined to split our furniture into pieces in order to search for bed bug eggs (also as an argument to have them come back and spray again).


(It all looked nice - even if not something we would have chosen ourselves - this is a picture I took before all this started)

I first decided to take the bottom cover off the arm chair in the living room (part of the 3-piece sofa set on the picture above). When I get the bottom off I see something that to me is almost worse than bed bug eggs: it was completely rotten, full of mold and mildew in all the different types possible!!!


(Getting the bottom cover off the arm chair - the rot is already visible)


(Rotten in all the parts)


(The type that looks like black dust/dirt...)


(...yellow, brown and reddish types...)


(...the long white type that looks like a spider's web...)


(...and last but not least the stringy brown type along with some circular purple!)

I am extremely allergic to this and immediately felt like I couldn’t breathe and I had chest pains (surely sleeping in the poison had not helped either). I dragged the arm chair and 2 sofas out into the hall, went down to Miss M and told her to come have a look (after taking pictures as I am collecting a lot of evidence here…). I don’t know if she understood just how serious this was but at least she understood when I told her very clearly to send the two maintenance guys up to carry it away immediately. I considered going to the hospital because I felt so bad but couldn’t handle the thought of going through that alone.

I spent the rest of the afternoon outside my apartment trying to get some ‘fresh’ air. Miss M called the pest control company and asked them to come again – they agreed to come at 4 pm. At 3 pm I asked her to call and confirm as I do not trust those guys at all – and since I had paid them a bribe once I was expecting them to try and get more money out of me. When she called at 3 pm sure enough they said they would come the next day. Miss M then – bless her – got really upset and told them directly ‘is it because we didn’t offer to pay the 15 KD again that you don’t come?? You promised me this morning!!!’ Apparently that scared them (her company has a permanent contract with their company to spray in the buildings they manage – cockroaches are a problem here so they regularly spray outside the buildings and in the lobbies) and they promised to come at 4 pm (and miraculously showed up at 3.30 pm).

In the mean time I had made a written request to replace the sofa set along with our 2 beds and I got the maintenance guys to help me dismantle and carry out the beds. The whole apartment then got sprayed again and I evacuated for another 4 hours.

When we came back that evening we found a live bed bug in the living room…


(What's left of our living room after they sprayed it the second time)

Wednesday 14 April: Again, we found live bed bugs – one in the guest bedroom in the morning and one in the master bedroom around lunchtime. I spent the morning spraying the guest bedroom cupboard and dresser – all drawers, all cracks and crevices with over-the-counter bed bug poison that I had bought myself. I then had to evacuate the apartment again as that poison is really nasty, too. In the afternoon I spent another hour or so insisting on getting a replacement for my dryer, as it is the only way I can effectively fight the bed bugs that are probably hiding in our clothes. At the end of the day I got one – not from the landlord of course but from Miss M’s company who delivered and installed it.

Thursday 15 April: I started the day trying to make a quarantine room in our guest room that I had sprayed the day before. I dusted insect powder in all the cracks and crevices of the cupboard and the dresser and made dust barriers on the floor and around the furniture to prevent them from running between the rooms.


(Our guest bedroom cupboard, sprayed, dusted and with washed and dried clothes in individual plastic bags)

I did more laundry and started packing down the master bed room – inspecting each individual item, cleaning it (to get the poison off our toiletries etc.) and packing it in a zip lock bag.


(Our life in plastic bags...)

Since the poison had also been sprayed in the kitchen I started to clean the surfaces so we could again cook or at least make a sandwich (we have eaten all meals outside this week – adding considerably to the cost of this war). When I cleaned the stove (gas) the ignition flame suddenly got stuck and was constantly clicking and sparking a small flame. Nothing could be done to make it un-stuck. At the end I had to dismantle part of the kitchen in order to get behind a drawer where the switch was located and we turned the whole thing off. After a while it slowly dried out and the sparks stopped – but for a good while we thought this was the end of our stove and the outlook of eating out for another couple of weeks until they could get it replaced…

When K got back from work and wanted to iron a t-shirt, the brand new ironing board cover melted and transferred onto the bottom of the iron as well (both were new and we had bought them ourselves as the landlord was reluctant to supply us with them in time). Apparently the textile cover couldn’t stand the poison and just melted.

We later went to a leaving party for two of our friends who are leaving Kuwait. We had specifically asked Mr. Hameed to send a taxi driver who knew the area and how to find the place (a couple of his drivers have taken us there before) – it is quite far outside the city in a poorly lit area where not all streets have numbers. He then sent someone who did not know the area (and did not admit to it until we were lost). It took us an hour or more to get there and we were driving around in circles with our friend on the phone trying to navigate based on villas, buildings, the water etc.

Another great day.

Friday 16 April: When sorting through our clothes (‘will survive 60 degrees’ in one pile and ‘dry clean’ in another pile) we found a live bed bug again, crawling on my jacket that was hanging in the built-in wardrobe in the master bedroom. We spent all day washing, drying, packing and sending clothes to the dry cleaner. We emptied our nightstands and inspected every single item before placing them in zip lock bags – throwing away all unnecessary cardboard and paper (like medicine packs and other wrapping).


(What's left in our master bed room - all nightstand and dresser drawers emptied and inspected - and ready to be sprayed in round 3)

Saturday 17 April: We woke up to a thunderstorm that came out of nowhere and darkened the skies as if it were night (I’ll write a separate post about this with some pictures). It was a good mixture of a storm, thunder, lightning, sand and gravel blowing in from the desert and some rain. The second we woke up – as the window frames were shaking so badly I thought they would fall in – I remembered that I had our laundry on our balcony downstairs. We quickly ran down and managed to get it inside before it flew away. 5 hours of washing wasted but at least we didn’t lose our clothes.

The apartment on the 16th floor suffered considerable water damage but luckily our real apartment is on the other side of the building and didn't get any damage (that would have been just great on top of everything else).

K and I spent the day checking things (like turning every page of our books and checking every seam of our clothes) to ensure that there are no more live bed bugs hiding – we’ll then worry about the eggs later when they ‘hatch’. As you can imagine it took most of the day to go through all our things, turning every piece of paper upside down, looking into things and packing everything in plastic bags (which is not 100% foolproof but will at least make it more difficult for them to get into our things).

The landlord came to our apartment with miss M to have a look for himself – all he kept saying was ‘khalas’ which means ‘finished’ – don’t think he wanted to admit that this is all but finished. K had insisted that the built-in wardrobe be torn down, as we knew they were living in there. The landlord of course didn’t want to do this and after discussing forever (poor Miss M translating between Arabic and English) he agreed that we make some holes in the back part of the wardrobe so that poison could be sprayed behind. He made one of the holes himself with our kitchen knife standing on one of our nightstands…Quite a spectacle. Then one of the maintenance guys drilled the other holes.


(Courtesy of the land lord: a square hole in our bedroom cupboard made with our kitchen knife)

In the afternoon we had a new dryer as the replacement was quite unreliable and unless we can assure that the temperature is above 50 degrees Celsius it is all wasted. It got installed and they carried the old one away along with some chairs and pillows that we wanted to get rid of.


(Getting ready for round 3 - making sure there are as few cracks left to hide in as possible)

At 3 pm the pest control came back (still without bribe) and sprayed again – now for the third time – and we went to buy more poison and other equipment for this war of ours. We did not ventilate after the 4 hours hoping that if we let the poison work overnight it would be more efficient.

Sunday 18 April: After yet another night on the 16th floor we went down in the morning to ventilate – the smell was still so strong from the poison that I felt sick and almost threw up. K had his shower and left for work and I went back to the 16th floor to sleep it off.