I see dead people . . .

So I lied. I said the next installment would be about similarities between Kuwait and Miami. I decided however that it would be totally uninteresting for me to ramble on about every little detail of my trip and tell everyone how similar it is here to home. So instead of telling you about palm trees, sandy beaches, wave runners and hot weather . . .


Every morning I open my hotel room door and like every other hotel in the world I am greeted by a newspaper at my feet. But there are no USA Today's here in Kuwait. No moderate commentary or oddly interesting little front page polls.

Sunday morning I opened my door to find the picture you see here staring up at me. No its not an add for the newest Johnny Depp Pirates of the Carribean box office smash. Its an actual picture of a skeleton found in a mass grave in Iraq.

Journalism in Kuwait is blunt to say the least. I dont think a day has passed where there havent been full color pictures of dead bodies in the paper. From car crashes to babies killed in earthquakes its all here. A startling dose of reality. It's mostly car crashes here because Kuwait has one of the highest automobile fatality rates in the world but theres always a good shot of a guy caught by a car bomb with no skin on his legs or some such story. And the odd part is that there is rarely a story to go with the picture. There's always a caption but most likely the editor has simply stuck the photo in the middle of a page of unrelated stories, as was the case with the pic I put here, no story just a picture and caption surrounded by stories about the upcoming elections.

I cant even imagine what would happen if US papers started printing stuff like this on a daily basis.