Name: 地理Now!クウェート (Geography Now! KUWAIT)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T10:19:25.000Z
Duration: 12 min 10 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Everybody welcome back to a brand new episode of Geography Now, thanks for your patience. I know you've been, Ku-waiting.

Yeah, we got a whole new set of intros, outros and transition slides.

, Ken made them. Follow him on instagram. Give him a round of applause.

Now when we cover Arab countries, I try really hard to explain how each of them is unique and distinguishable from the others?

I mean clearly a Yemeni will be pretty different from a Lebanese person, so what makes Kuwait stick out?

Well, let's find out by starting out with another cool transition slide.

One last time we were in the Gulf, was it Bahrain? No no is Iran? - No it was Iraq! Iraq, yes Iraq.

This place has a lot of interesting people surrounding it. First of all,

Kuwait is located on the northeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula.

At the tip of the Persian Gulf bordered by Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

*Gasp* You called it Pers- We've been over this like four times. I'm not doing it again.

The country owns nine main islands. The largest being Bubiyan right at the border with Iraq on the Khasr-Az-Zubayr waterway.

The capital is Kuwait City located on the bay whereas the country is divided into Six Governorates.

The country is currently almost complete with finishing the Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah Causeway

which is set to cross the bay connecting the main city, Kuwait City to the northern part, effectively cutting traffic in half.

The largest city is of course Kuwait City

Which also holds the country's one and only International Airport, Kuwait International.

Whereas the other airports are just for military use like the US military base camp Buehring.

The largest cities outside of Kuwait City's metropolitan area would be Abdali in the north and Al Wafrah in the south.

However, the country's hoping that a ton of people will move into the Sabah Al-Ahmad Sea city after completion,

known for being the "opposite and more eco-friendly version of Dubai's Palm City" because it's like:

Kuwait: Hey Emirates. What are you doing?

UAE : Yeah? Umm Um, just making artificial islands.

UAE: Well see, I siphoned the land up from the bottom of the sea up and then voila a new island appears.

Kuwait: Well wouldn't that like actually destroy most the coral reefs and kill all the fish?

UAE: Either way how you kind of have a better idea on how to make a...

Kuwait: Well actually I do. you see in Kuwait, we just build artificial waterways

and let the sea naturally funnel through them through tidal gates. That way we don't destroy the ecosystem.

UAE: Uhh Okay, here's like 50 dirham. Just just shut up. Okay

Kuwait: That's cute. My currency is way higher in value than you!

Otherwise, some places of interest might include places like:

Aqua Park, The Scientific Museum, Jaber  Al-Ahmad Cultural Center,

360 Mall, the Mirror House, Jaber Al-Ahmad Stadium, Al-Shaheed Park, Al Hamra Tower and Mall

One another weird but kind of cool thing that maybe you can check out.

If you go to the northern border with Iraq, you can see all the residue from the Gulf War times,

destroyed oil fields that have solidified into tar and near the South you can see a ton of industrial pipelines and refinery buildings.

That's where Kuwait's little secret lies. Perfect opportunity for us to jump into the next part, shall we?

For those of you that know at least a little bit about Kuwait, images of the burning oil fields from the 90s Gulf War are

are probably what get conjured up when you hear the word 'Kuwait'.

Fair enough, I mean that was a thing that happened.

I mean they are the world's third largest oil producer holding about 104 billion barrels

and reserves almost 10% of the entire world supply mostly found in Bergenfield,

but hey, There's a little bit more to Kuwait than just oil - like what?

Now if you watched one of our previous episodes that

I loved researching so much that I literally went there because I was curious, Bahrain

You'll probably know how Kuwait, a dry desolate desert country with no permanent bodies of water gets its water.

Rain? - No. - Wells? - Not really... -  Waterfalls?

Waterfalls aren't necessarily permanent. They can halt if conditions cause the thing to occur.

Kuwait like many other countries gets hydrated primarily through desalinization plants.

In fact, Kuwait was the first country in the world to introduce desalinization as a primary supplier of water

to a large scale population back in the 50s.

The iconic landmark symbolizing the nation, the Kuwait Towers are in themselves Water Towers that store up water.

Well, these two are but this one holds equipment and controls the power of these two

and this one also has a cafe and rotating restaurant on top and this smaller sphere thing.

Thank You Noah. You guys asked for more of Noah so I gave it to you.

The highest point is only about 110 meters tall. There's the Bubiyan Island Wetland Conservation where birds flock to.

The national animal is the Golden Falcon. Uhhhh,

On all those Shamal winds from Iraq that we talked about in the Iraq episode made Kuwait generally colder than its neighbors.

Seriously, sometimes you see people wearing this which is called a Bisht.

This was actually sent to me in the Jamaica flag/fan Friday episode in which one of you guys an actual Kuwaiti person,

Abdul Aziz, you sent it to me. I actually get to use your gift in the Kuwait episode. Isn't that cool? You rock man!

Speaking of which, summers can be swelteringly hot. It's not uncommon to reach over 50 degrees Celsius.

It's so hot that they literally had to change their national day from June 19th of February 25th

to allow the people to celebrate comfortably and not die outdoors.

Otherwise outside of oil, Kuwait used to be known for having some of the most sought-after pearls harvested from wild oysters.

The problem was somewhere in like 1916, this happened.

Kuwait: I'll never lose this industry. I'm on top of the world!

Japan: Wait, why don't I just cultivate these oysters and artificially graph them so that I can manufacture pearls on a large and controlled scale?

And that's kind of how that ended, but yeah again, oil. So yeah.

But anyway. Enough on all of that. Let's see another cool transition slide, shall we?

Kuwaiti, that's what you call these people, Kuwaitis

Not Kuwaiti-an, not Kuwaitian, not Kuwaitinese, Kuwaiti.

the country has about 4.2 million people and is the second richest GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) Country after Qatar.

Now here's where things get a little interesting. Out of all the people in Kuwait,

only about 30% are actual Kuwaiti people and citizens whom identify as Arab as well.

about 70% of the country is populated by non-citizen expatriates.

You get a lot of this type of population dynamic in the Gulf countries. Don't be too shocked.

Out of the remaining 70% of expatriates, another 30% or so are Arabs coming from places like Iraq and Egypt

while the remainder of the population mostly comes from a slew of Asian countries mostly