The Nineties in Kuwait

A few days ago I went over to a friend’s place in the evening to cook dinner and hang out. As we ate we were listening to his iTunes playlist of old school early- to mid-nineties alternative rock and it brought back so many memories, for both of us. So after dinner he brought out a big box of pictures he had from his high school and college days, and we sat for a couple of hours going through them. What struck me is how similar his high school experiences in Dublin were to my own in Kuwait. And I realized that in many ways, high school kids everywhere to a certain extent go through the same phases, no matter where they are in the world – well at least it’s true if you went to an international school in Kuwait. But I feel like high school kids now are so different from what we were like in the mid-nineties. I’ve been back to the A.S.K. campus recently and the high school girls are all wearing tight blue pants and trendy white tops, and are wearing more make-up than me and most of my friends wear in our mid-twenties! It’s such a shame.

Maybe it’s a generational thing, or maybe it was the nineties – but in my day high schoolers were grunge kids. I remember constantly getting in trouble for violating school uniform not by wearing a short skirt but by wearing a flannel shirt over my mandatory white shirt. I wore my Doc Martens tied loosely with black and white checkered laces, and sat on the floor by the lockers listening to Nirvana, Jellyfish, and the Breeders on my ever-playing walkman. Those were the days when KFSAC and EMAC meant something – when the whole school would bunk off last period on Wednesday to catch the first game, and then stay all evening and all weekend, cheering our team to victory and enjoying the barbeques, before everyone would jump into the pool in their clothes after A.S.K. inevitably won. Those were the days when there was nothing to do in Kuwait at night on the weekend but go to Zahra Complex, Pizza Hut, White House or GoForIt tape shops, Chi-Chi’s, California Penguin (a pure A.S.K. hangout in 1993, in the spot where Great Steak and Potato Company is now), Wendy’s, and Carlucci’s for sheesha. Oh, and of course, the old Safir for bowling and billiards. And Fuddruckers in the later years. In those days when there was a party, the whole school would be there – 8th graders to seniors – everyone was friends, and everyone had a good time. The nineties (and especially the early nineties) in Kuwait rocked. We called into K107 – Kuwait’s first post-invasion radio station broadcast live from…wait for it…Camp Doha. We survived Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. We experienced the release of Nirvana’s “Nevermind”, Pearl Jam’s “Ten”, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ “Blood Sugar Sex Magic”, and the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Siamese Dream”. I remember sitting in the hallway with my fellow freshmen mourning the day that River Phoenix died, and the day that Kurt Cobain killed himself. We wore fake tattoos, ear cuffs, and funky coloured Docs (or at least some of us did – and Raine wore maroon Bronx). And then when the mid-nineties descended upon us, we danced our asses off to “Mr. Vain” and did so with pride and with absolutely no shame.

What a time. I think my generation was the last to experience what Kuwait, and A.S.K., was like before everything suddenly changed by the late nineties. To experience what Kuwait was like when only the kids from the four main private schools used to go out on the weekends so everywhere you’d go you’d see everyone you knew and no-one else. We had fun in those days. Remember SAS on the weekends? And Khairan? And shopping in “Old Salmiya”? And the tent in the bara7a in Surra (this is specifically for anyone who went to A.S.K. back in the Surra campus days)?

In 1994 we created a “school sponsored” time capsule to commemorate the 30 year anniversary of A.S.K. It unfortunately got “lost” in the move to the Hawalli campus the next year (how exactly that happened, I will never understand) – the campus in which I was unfortunately forced to spend my final A.S.K. years (*sniff*). I would love to find that box because two of my friends and I put a tape in it of all the music we were listening to at the time. From what I can remember, we had stuff on there from Jellyfish’s “Spilt Milk”, Pulp’s “His’n’Hers”, and Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “Fear” (among others that I can’t remember).

So what’s inside your own “Nineties In Kuwait” time capsule?

It is by pure coincidence that Raine and I both posted about this at the same time. She posted hers before mine, but I had written this a couple of days ago but wasn't able to post it because my internet at home has been out.