it all began, I was extremely pleased to just be watching. The class consisted of stretching and frantic running around with the occasional flashy kick thrown in but precious little combat. All the running about looked exhausting, and in the state I was in, it would have killed me.
After about forty-five minutes, Shahram made his excuses and left early before the class was over. Before we left, Shahram gave his teacher a formal, martial arts-type bow. The teacher returned this to him, then put his hand on his heart and bowed to me in a more informal manner. I did the same in return.
On arrival back at Shahram’s place, we were presented with a delicious spaghetti bolognese. It looked and smelt divine and was beautifully prepared. Shahram and Kimya seemed keen to smother all the flavor out of theirs with copious amounts of tomato ketchup, and it was a real effort to stop Shahram doing the same with mine. At first, I think he thought I was just trying to be polite and that surely I wanted some of the stuff. It wasn’t easy to convince him that I didn’t, but he eventually gave up.
I liked Shahram a lot but it has to be said, his table manners weren’t the best in the world. Not only did he make loud intentional slurping sounds for effect, but he forced whole chunks of bread into his mouth, with his fingers pushing the bread into every available cheek crevice. It left him resembling a bloated puffer fish, which he thought most amusing. As well as eating like a pig, he was also keen to hear if I’d ever tasted pig and what it was like. Rather unfairly, I said it was without doubt the greatest tasting meat in the world—after all, you can’t beat a good bacon sandwich. Kimya asked if I had tasted rabbit and explained that this was also forbidden by their religion. This was news to me.
Shahram took charge of dessert, which was a large green melon. He had an interesting way of serving it, which was to hold it in one hand and peel off all of the outside skin with a knife without putting in down once. Still grasping the whole peeled melon, he chopped it into little cubes then served it.
Being the better English speaker, Kimya had plenty of questions for me about life in Britain. Of particular shock to her was learning that unmarried friends of the opposite sex could share apartments together and that people didn’t have to live with their parents up until marriage. She asked what I thought of the hijab scarf she wore and if girls in England would wear one. I let her know the lay of the land at home on this one and asked if women in Iran would wear it if they didn’t have to. This provided a telling response from both of them.
“If women didn’t have to wear the hijab, I think a lot of them wouldn’t wear it,” said Kimya.
Shahram chipped in and corrected her. “Er, no, I think they would still wear it.”
“Oh yes,” she now corrected herself, “Yes, I think they would still wear it.”
They were both fascinated by my lifestyle and thought it very strange I had casually left a job to go traveling and just planned to find a new one when I returned.
“In Iran, you don’t choose a job, the job chooses you,” said Shahram.
I had as many questions for them as they had for me and got them talking about what they thought of their government. Shahram summed it up nicely with, “Government bad, people good.”
“Like mine,” I told him.
I wondered what they would think of a dose of Bush and Blair style “liberation.” Both were absolutely appalled by the suggestion and said of the situation in Iraq, “It is terrible.” I agreed. After we finished dinner, there was a knock on the door. Kimya went to answer while Shahram and I reclined on the sofa. She returned a minute later and explained that earlier on she had told her friends that they had a “tourist” staying with them and that now they had come around to, as she phrased it, “look at” me. And that’s pretty much what they did.
In walked a guy of about thirty along with two girls in their early twenties who were dressed in light-colored bedsheet-like cloths, leaving only their faces visible. I shook the guy’s hand and put my hand on my heart and bowed to the girls. Kimya explained, as if to put my mind at rest, that it was okay her friends were out together as they were brother and sisters. “Phew, thank goodness for that,” I thought.
The girls seemed very shy and much less approachable than Kimya. Neither of them spoke English, so their limited questions were translated for me by Kimya. It was the normal stuff again: What was my job? What was my salary? How old was I? Was I married? Along with a couple of new questions like, “What is the main industry in England?” I struggled with this one and copped out by saying, “Banking.” After this, they just sort of stared at me as if they’d never seen a funny-looking bastard before. Fifteen minutes later and they were gone.
I then got my first taste of Iranian state television, which was put on especially for me, when it was time for the nightly Iranian news broadcast in English. Ironically, the woman reading had a very strong American accent, which I thought strange considering the Iranian government’s dislike of all things American. It was nearly all about the chaos in Iraq and filled with gruesome footage of civilian deaths. The news was followed by loads of patriotic war clips from the Iran-Iraq War, along with clips of Iranian flags fluttering in the wind.
We all hit the sack soon after, and despite my protests, they insisted I slept in their nice big double bed, while they slept on the floor of the television room. They were both exceptionally generous to give me their bed, and on it I slept like a log.
CHAPTER SIX
At the time of writing, there are 9,418 Iranian rials to every single U.S. dollar. Since the highest commonly available denomination in Iran is a 10,000 rial note, any exchanging of Western currency leaves you with one hell of a big bank roll.
Since Iran is essentially a cash economy where credit cards are just about nonexistent (not that I have a credit card, thanks to my declaration of bankruptcy a few years ago), I had to change a significant amount of money. In total, I had about $1,200, having blown around $150 to get here, so I figured $600 would be a good amount to convert. To help with the translations, Shahram had kindly accompanied me to the main bank in Tabriz, which looked like a bank from old Victorian London. There were no security screens and everything was done face- to-face. I handed over my thin sliver of hundred-dollar bills and waited for what seemed like an eternity while the guy behind the counter counted out my Iranian cash. He finished one pile, and then started on another. The first, it turned out, was only the small decimal change. The main bank “roll,” which was so big I couldn’t have rolled it, was ridiculous and must have been a good ten inches thick, containing roughly six hundred notes.
I felt a bit guilty at having changed such a vast sum in front of Shahram as the average annual income in Iran is around six thousand dollars, and one in seven Iranians earns less than a dollar a day.
Shahram and I bade each other goodbye outside the bank with a warm man-hug. I thanked him an embarrassing amount of times for his and Kimya’s generous hospitality and promised to be back again to see them within the month. This was imperative because earlier in the morning, I had asked them if I could leave some of my camping gear behind as I was now lugging around far more stuff than I needed. My tent and camping equipment had been invaluable on the way to Iran but as I planned to stay in hotels from now on, they had become obsolete. Shahram had agreed to this without a second thought, and as a result, I had stripped everything down to the bare essentials. By the time I’d finished, my backpack was a fraction of its former weight.
A steaming black Nescafe was graciously passed my way in the Tabriz Tourist Office by multilingual Mr. Nasser Khan. He was a wealth of information, and after hearing my planned itinerary, suggested that I take a slightly different route around Iran and go to see Babak Castle when I returned to Tabriz.
His recommended route, he explained, would still include all the sights I wanted to see but would save me loads of time with connections. This was very important considering the staggering size of Iran, into which you could fit France, Germany, Britain, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Portugal, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic with over 15,440 square miles to spare.
After very little in the way of deliberations, I decided to go with his suggested route and now planned to leave this afternoon on an overnight bus for the town of Rasht near the Caspian sea, and from there to travel on to the scenic mountain village of Masuleh. Having time to kill until my bus left, I decided to pay a visit to a large, blue- colored mosque in the center of town, aptly named the Blue Mosque. The entrance portal was very attractive and decorated with hundreds of brilliant blue tiles repeating the name of Allah in different variations. It was incredibly intricate and completely unlike the mosques I’d seen in Turkey on the way here. The mosque dated from the fifteenth century and had suffered repeatedly from earthquakes, and as such was under extensive restoration. This
