I will kick off today's pictorial tour of the Middle East with this video, from a wedding in Amman, posted by Jordanian blogger Roba Al Assi.

“Eccentric, and I still really can’t get past trying to figure out why in the world would anyone want a Greco-Roman sword fight at their wedding. Historical influences that the Greco-Roman culture has left in Jordan? Too much of that 800 movie? Al-Resalah style Arab love of sword fights? Mind-boggling indeed.
Personally, I guess I side with the regular (and I suppose boring, I mean, what, no sword fight?!) zaffeh*,” she explains.

Our next stop is in Kuwait, where Fonzy shows us images of how Kuwait City looks like in a dust storm.

“Yesterday the weather forecast predicted light winds, which I felt on my way to work in the morning and it felt refreshing. Those same winds brought dust later on in the day. Looking out my office window, the skies were full of dust and I could barely see anything. Things are only gonna get worse and from what I heard, its gonna be quite similar most of the summer,” he notes.

While still in Kuwait, intlxpatr, gives us a photo album of changes to Kuwait City's skyline, sans the dust here.

“Kuwait in the 1970’s was called the Paris of the Gulf. People who lived here then talk about it with great nostalgia, they call it paradise. Kuwait was an old trading city, full of merchants and traders. Kuwaiti men went out on fishing boats, and pearling boats, and the love of the sea is still deep in the Kuwaiti soul. The women were strong and adventurous, and took care of all the family business while the men were out to sea.
Kuwait had a tradition of tolerance and sophistication found nowhere else in the Gulf,” writes the blogger.

Moving to Lebanon, we will make a stop at this image, of Mount Lebanon, posted by finkployd with a one-liner which sums up the story:

this past Sunday, people converged in the mountains to escape the heat and the news…

Our last image of the week is a picture taken by Bahraini blogger Mahmood Al Yousif of a tiny Bulbul in its nest, which has just hatched in his garden.

Al Yousif celebrates the beginning of those birds new lives, but paying tribute to his loving father who passed away a year ago.

“The first to hatch of the bulbuls who have nested in one of our ficuses.
I’ll dedicate this shot to my father, who departed this world one year ago tomorrow,” he writes.

* A ‘Zaffeh’ is a traditional wedding procession