Ghani Palace

The Lebanese man sits poolside smoking a cigarette on the rooftop of the Ghani Palace Hotel as the dusty winds swirl about Salmiya, just outside Kuwait City. I swing my feet back and forth in the warm water chatting up some long-term residents of the Palace, where the motto is: “Our Palace is Your Home”. It’s dark, yet in the evening light it’s not hard to see the peeling facade and the ornamental wind towers aging before one’s eyes. Old cigarettes float on the surface of the water and I muse over the way in which things appear to land here and affix themselves to this seemingly old hotel.

A plate of rice on the staircase, a broken crib on the landing, old red restaurant chairs, crinkled candy wrappers, a hotel gym more akin to a storage closet. Employees stand on the balconies, smoke and smile casually as I stroll past clutching a water bottle in hand. The elevator grinds its way creepily up to the higher floors, and so I take the stairs, which seem to end for no apparent reason and begin again on the other side of the building. I request toilet paper or a towel and am told that it will be delivered to my palace room, but not until housekeeping office hours. The doorbell rings and it sounds like a hungry rodent stealing through the bowels of the subway. And yet, I love this place! And Kuwait. I feel as if I’m finally traveling in the Middle East.


From my balcony, the mixed history of Kuwait is made visible on the landscape. Battered structures are set against the backdrop of the beautiful, enormously walkable and welcoming plagette (also known as the corniche), a site where I spend many a night safely strolling (seriously, Mom!) past clumps of Kuwaitis in traditional clothing gathered for evening picnics and gossip and surreptitious hand holding. Kids titter and skip along the boardwalk, bright red blinking lights in their tiny shoes, while young and old men press their hands to the ground in prayer on turf supported by desalinized H2O. And the wind, the warm night wind, makes even a haggard 40-something feel lovely in this youthful nation of nearly 3 million. New skyscrapers and university buildings press onward and upward into the future, while the museums present a link to the not-so-distant Iraq invasion of 1990. I try to imagine what it’s like to be teeny-tiny Kuwait amidst a region of states with big ideas and a broad cultural reach. I would likely drink bootlegged cognac as often as possible.

We visit the House of National Memorial Museum, which we’re told is not for the faint of heart. It memorializes the Iraq invasion, and appeals to all the senses, with booming sounds of gunfire that infuse colorful dioramas, and graphic images of those tortured in the war. We penguin our way through the exhibits, waddling, tired and heavy on our legs, until we reach the near end, when Saddam’s bronze head appears in a tiny room. We’re told that this is it – the bust from the iconic statue that was toppled at the symbolic “end” of the Saddam regime. I am stunned, and so I ask our leader, “Could this really be it?” to which she elegantly replies: “Who else would want it?”