you. I tried it with Hafez and with Modern Talking. This is what I got, and I’m not saying which is which:
In a quest to find a good eating establishment, Verity dipped into her guidebook, wherein she discovered a fascinatingsounding location called the Restaurant Mir Mohanna. Here it was apparently possible to get a shark kebab served by identical twins dressed rather eccentrically as indistinguishable sailors. This sounded my kind of place, so I lobbied hard with Verity for this option. She wasn’t convinced and favored a more traditional upmarket place called the Soofie Traditional Restaurant. In the end, though, I won through and off we went to go see the salty sailors. It took a while to get there and turned out to be a complete waste of time, as according to a kindly old chap we met there, the restaurant had been closed for years.
We got in a cab and went to Verity’s option instead. Or to be more accurate, we went to a restaurant that sounded vaguely similar to the one we’d asked the taxi driver to take us to.
It might not have been the place we selected but it was nice enough and the food was okay, if a little on the raw side—my chicken kebab sported a few splatterings of blood. Verity of course went for the funny herbivore option. It was strange to again be in a nice restaurant and unable to order a bottle of wine, especially as we were in Shiraz, home of the famous Shiraz grapes used around the world for wine of the same name. We made do with an Iranian Zam Zam cola instead.
Since we were both heading to the same city next and had had a good laugh together, we agreed to meet up again in Yazd, at the most popular hostel there, the Silk Road Hotel. After our meal, we spent the rest of the day window-shopping along the main street, where we discovered a rather interesting baseball cap for sale depicting an Australian flag but with the word PORTUGAL emblazoned across it. I didn’t buy one, but I wish now that I had, as it would have made a great present for one of my Aussie friends. When it was time to go, I said a quick “Adios” to Verity, grabbed my gear, and got a cab down to the bus terminal.
It was dark by now, but it was another tantalizingly hot and sticky Middle Eastern evening. I went to the counter where I’d bought my ticket from and inquired which bay I needed. The man I’d spoken to earlier was now no longer here, and a colleague of his pointed me in the direction of the correct bay. On arrival there, I was astonished to see not a shiny new modern “Volvo,” as promised, but a beat-up old rust bucket that didn’t look like it could make it to the other end of the terminal, let alone a few hundred miles. I couldn’t believe it and was just about to go voice my discontent when it reversed out of the bay and in its place pulled up a shiny new “Volvo.” This was more like it.
Whilst waiting to board I was approached by a friendly man who spoke good but extremely fast and slightly quirky English.
“Ah, you are Englishman from England. I like the Englishman very much!” he said. “I once have English gentleman stay with my family. His name Mr. Montgomery Fielding; he is frightfully frightfully!”
I laughed.
I didn’t get the guy’s name, but he was a real character and introduced me to his son called Reza, who was twenty years old and catching the same bus as me.
“You will sit next to my son on bus and stay at my home in Yazd as my guest,” he stated simply, as if it was totally normal to offer accommodation to complete strangers met at the local bus station only moments before.
Being fully aware of the refuse three times rule of Iranian social etiquette, I did so to check if the offer was genuine—it was. In many ways, this typified the unbelievable hospitality shown by Iranians toward foreigners, and although I was initially surprised at his generosity, I really shouldn’t have been. His son, he explained, was a student and spoke only a little English, so it would be good for him to practice with me. He assured me that Reza would be more than happy to look after me in Yazd and show me around the place. He apologized for not being able to do this himself and explained that he wasn’t catching the bus but staying in Shiraz for a week on business.
One of the destinations in Yazd he said Reza would take me to was a Zoroastrian fire temple. I asked him if he was a Zoroastrian. He said he was and then told me a little bit about the religion’s beliefs, in particular about the earth, the trees, and the water being sacred. I liked that and him very much.
Reza and I both sat at the front of the bus and, although his English wasn’t great, we just about managed to communicate. After some labored conversation, he pulled out his DVD collection, which was contained in a little zip-up wallet. With a mischievous grin, he pointed to one of the disks and said, “Super film!”
At first I didn’t understand what was on the disk, but after a while I managed to ascertain that a “super film” was in fact a porn movie. I asked what the penalty for having this would be. He struggled with the words but answered with exactly the right ones, saying, “You put in cage for maybe two or three year.” That was quite a risk to take for a bit of porn, no matter how super it was. Although I’d planned to sleep on the bus, it didn’t really work out like that as we talked, or struggled to talk, to each other most of the way.
We arrived in Yazd much earlier than the bus was due and got to the terminal at about two in the morning instead of four. Reza gave his older brother a quick call, who came to pick us up in a beat-up old Land Rover. Even at this hour, his brother didn’t seem in the slightest bit tired and was very enthusiastic to meet me. He introduced himself as Ashkan. Ashkan’s English was far better than his younger brother’s, and on the journey over to their house we both chatted away nonstop.
When we arrived there, I was asked to be as quiet as possible, as the rest of the family was asleep. They led me inside the front room, where about eight people were all lying on thin mattresses on the floor. I assumed I would be doing the same, but Iranian hospitality being what it is, I was shown instead to an empty room that I had all to myself. I didn’t want to try to refuse their generosity and risk waking someone up, and what’s more, there would have been no point in trying anyway, so I just whispered a quiet thank-you. Reza brought me a similar mattress to the ones the family were using and a big thick blanket. He closed the door and bade me goodnight. Moments later I was asleep.
In the morning, I was introduced to the rest of the family, who were all female and, apart from their mother, were much younger than Reza and Ashkan. Being the men of the household, the brothers didn’t lift a finger at breakfast, which was served for us by their adorable little sisters on a plastic mat on the floor of the main room. We had boiled eggs, bread, real honeycomb, yogurt, and olives.
After breakfast, I was keen to go sightseeing, but I didn’t want it to seem like I was setting the agenda, so I waited for the brothers to make a suggestion on where to go and what to do. Their suggestion was to go check out their PC in the room next door and for them to give me a full demonstration of how it worked.
What was it with young Iranians and their computers?
The computer was clearly their pride and joy and was fully rigged up to the Internet. They had downloaded loads of music videos and other crap, like fake WWE wrestling, all of which they were determined to show me. So my introduction to Yazd was not a tour of its splendid cultural and historical sights, but a couple of hours of watching stupid redneck wrestling nonsense and the likes of Britney sodding Spears shaking her butt about. This was all very kind of them to show me some prime examples of refined American culture, but it wasn’t really what I’d come to Iran or to Yazd for. I’d come to Yazd because it was the country’s quintessential desert city, sandwiched between the Dasht-e Lut desert in the south and the Dasht-e Kavir desert in the north. As deserts are one of my favorite environments, it appealed greatly. It is also home to the biggest Zoroastrian community in Iran, and has the country’s finest old city, which is still inhabited. Yazd was described by Marco Polo as, “a very fine and splendid city and center of commerce.” Yazd has always been renowned as a weaving town and was famed for its wonderful silks long before Marco Polo journeyed through on one of the multiple silk roads. After the Arab conquest, the city became a major stopping point along the caravan routes to India and Central Asia, and as a result its goods and crafts traveled far beyond the borders of Iran.
