The Extraterrestrial's Guide to Iran

For a couple of days, we were trying to get used to Iran.
 
After leaving our friend, we continued our journey further. Over one week, winter turned into summer. Since I still only had winter clothes and a black hijab, I was hot all the time. (Whereas Iranian people still wore winter coats, complained about cold and in their cars and homes their heating was on like in the middle of winter.) 

Traffic lines suitable for the Iranian traffic rules

3000 years of civilization

One of the funniest things was money. Nobody ever uses the numbers as they are written on the banknotes. People usually say prices in Tumans, which means that in their minds they delete the last zero on the banknote. Sometimes, though, they delete three zeros. Or two. Or they say a different price (usually when they are speaking English and they are not sure how to tell some numbers, so you'd better learn the Farsi numbers).

We learned that Iranian people loved sugar and sweets even more than people in Turkey. Since they never deliberately walk and the oil is so cheap that even 200 meters is a distance long enough to be travelled by car, I couldn't understand how come they were not fat. (I think that if I consumed the same amount of sugar every day, I would turn into a huge fatball within a month.)

We found out that one of the differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims was that Shia Muslims (that means most of Iranian people) pray three times a day instead of five times. That also meant fewer mosque chants, so we couldn't use it much to tell time as we did in Turkey.

Camping like a boss

We discovered that Iran had the best bathrooms in the world. They mostly are for free and they are everywhere. There always is soap, they hardly ever are gross and, above all, they have water hoses that you actually can use. These hoses are outside the toilet so they don't look like something that will infect you with plague and cholera and kill you within 3 days - and they can be aimed with. (So you can use them as quite a decent shower if you get disgusting enough to need it). So even though I hated squatting toilets in Turkey because they were too gross to be used properly and their slimy hoses always splashed me all over, I started loving these toilets in Iran - even though they still were unergonomic. And if the bathrooms were too crowded, there always was one poor sitting toilet free (it's called something like "toalet farangin") because everybody but me was afraid to use it. As Vojta said, the Iranian bathrooms are a nice result of 3000 years of civilization.

We saw a lot of tents all around city parks and sometimes just at random in the countryside. We were happy we didn't have to hide our tent out of fear of being kicked out. Locals camped in a much more fancy way than us, though - they had carpets, big cooking stoves, pillows and water pipes. And cars. There is actually nothing like carrying the tent somewhere by walking. Also, in the parks and also randomly in the streets there very often were fountains with cold drinking water. For free, of course (another result of 3000 years of civilization, I suppose). 

Separated subway compartments

We also soon realized that public city transport was close to non-existent. (So, logically, every city is just a huge honking traffic jam.) In Tehran, there is an overcrowded subway and some overcrowded buses (even though it feels like a cattle cart, there still always are sellers who, thanks to a special superpower, are able to move through the totally packed carriage, shout and sell stuff). Here, I found so far the first advantage of being a woman in Iran. In carriages, there are separate parts for men and for women, and the female part is always less crowded (which means that it's just crowded, not completely packed). In other cities, there is maybe a couple of buses. Sometimes. "Public" transport then consists of cabs that have specific routes as if they were buses. Except that they are smaller, more expensive, drive crazier and it is easier to get scammed in there (it seems that taxi drivers are a specific species since they are probably the only group of people who are not overwhelmingly nice to foreigners in Iran). That's why we have often gave up and have walked instead. However, our hitchhiking drivers were usually so nice that they have driven us through the whole city to the place we needed. (Or, someone was so surprised they saw people - and what's more, foreigners -  walking, and gave us a ride inside the city.) So we have, surprisingly, made much less urban hiking than expected and than in Europe.

 

A random guy in the mountains

We were trying to find out how tarof worked, which for me resulted into a general paranoia. We eventually settled on the model "keep refusing everything; if they mean it, they will push it onto you no matter how much you protest anyway". (And they very often meant it.) Just refusing rides was kind of stupid since we actually were hitchhiking. However, if a driver of a totally packed car or car with just one spare seat accepted us, we would kind of recognize it was a tarof.

We found out that like in the previous countries, there was no way how to sort out garbage in Iran. And often people didn't bother to put it in garbage cases either. At the beginning, my heart was sore a couple of times when I saw our drivers throwing our trash out of the car windows on a nice mountain plain. Then I started insisting on throwing my garbage myself. Sometimes I would hide it out of fear our driver would tell me to dump it out of the window too.
 
I also spent a couple of days staring at people in chadors and trying to figure out how the hell they could walk with them. (For those who don't know, chador is a big long - usually black - sheet with a tiny hood. It is only worn by women, usually the traditional ones.) Since chadors don't have any buttons whatsoever or holes for arms, people always have to hold them. I saw ladies in the streets towing the bottoms of their chadors behind them, looking like turtles if they had a small backpack underneath, holding their chadors by teeth when they needed to use hands or having the chadors tied around their bodies like an Indian sari. Sometimes the chador would just fall or was fluttering behind them as a flag when it was a bit windy. (I even saw a lady hiking a rocky mountain path with a chador on, though.) It seemed to me that one must be very pious in order to be willing to inflict so much suffering every day on themselves for God's sake.
So far, chador is the winner of my personal competition for the least practical and most annoying garment in the world. Before that, high-heeled shoes and handbags without holders had been sharing the first place. It is worth mentioning, though, that some Iranian ladies manage to wear all the three most annoying garments at once.

Coats and chadors

Khareji power

It was before Nowruz, the new year celebration, and streets everywhere were packed with people and cars. We could never walk unnoticed.

Every couple of minutes, we would hear somebody shouting "khareji, khareji!" (foreigners). Then people would come to say salam and take a selfie with us. We would tell them all the Farsi words we knew and would try to explain where we were from and that our country was neither in Germany or in the Netherlands, nor in Russia. Then they would recall the name of Petr Čech and other famous Czech soccer players they knew way better than us. Surprisingly, nobody would come to sell us stuff and hotels or manipulate us into giving them money. People just wanted to talk.

We were also not always able to eat our snack. Drivers would very often invite us for a lunch instead. Once, when we sat in a park among pick-nicking families, we didn't even have time to unpack our bread and beans. A man came and invited us for a delicious home-made soup. 

A nice family who invited us for food

If we were lucky enough (and it would happen quite often), the person who approached us could speak good English. We would then talk, sometimes for quite a long time, and sometimes the person would invite us home.

Most of the people we met had never been abroad, the biggest travellers among them maybe once or twice in their lives. There were too many obstacles. There are just very few countries where one can go without a visa with an Iranian passport, and it always is too expensive. Last but not least, guys are not allowed to leave their country before their military service unless they pay a huge deposit.

Kiwi packing

Being a good person is good enough

We met as many interesting people and had as many interesting conversations within just a couple of days as never before. It seemed that people were not only hospitable, but also curious and hungry to seize any opportunity to talk with anybody from the outside. Sometimes because they just wanted to tell us they were not terrorists, sometimes because they wanted to hang out with us.
It also seemed that our backpacks worked like a magnet for liberal and/or open-minded people. 

Most of those we spoke with were very open for a discussion about religion, functioning of our societies and life in general. And poetry. (And our acquaintance who would speak English would usually become interpreter for all their relatives who were equally curious.) Also, most of them offered me to take off my hijab at home since they respected I was not a Muslim. Some of them didn't wear hijabs at their places either.

There was an English teacher and his wife (in a chador) who showed us around a city and took us to Nowruz markets. In the car, the teacher was reciting poems by Rumi for us. At the market, we got several things for free from the shopkeepers just because we were foreigners. (Normally I would think it was a tarof, but our friends certainly were better at recognizing tarof than us.)

Iranian music instrument

There was a young guy with a very religious-looking beard who told us a story how he had been imprisoned for one day since he had tried to smuggle vodka to a concert. 

There was an elderly man who was a big fan of Rumi and his poems. A girl from India was also a guest in his family and they would discuss Rumi together (even though they needed the son of the family as interpreter). When the father found out that Vojta was learning Farsi, he taught him a part of one of the famous poems. (The Indian girl then gave me a light-coloured headscarf and a shirt since she was leaving Iran. I could finally stop frying in my black scarf. The shirt was smaller than my size but I was happy for it anyway. My only other summer garment Islamic enough was an old LARP costume made by myself, with holes and sleeves of different lengths.)

Rumi

There also was a young smart girl with a perfect English (let's call her Tahmineh - it means something like courageous or strong and I think it suits her well) and her family. Their house was a safe haven where I was forgetting I actually was in a theocratic country. Tahmineh and her relatives had no troubles shaking hands with Vojta (and her father and uncles with me), her friends (just girls, though) were coming and going and people didn't worry about scarves and long sleeves inside the house too much. Everybody in Tahmineh's family was curious to see us, and ask who we were and how come we hadn't frozen to death in our tent in winter.

I got along with Tahmineh really well. I felt we were close to each other in our way of thinking even though we came from very different backgrounds. It seemed to me that she didn't really belong to Iran. I could very well imagine her living in some western-European country.

She seemed excited to be with us and was willing to discuss pretty much anything we wanted to know. 

We were talking about tarof and how to recognize it (the answer is that one needs to be Iranian and even then it's not sure). We were discussing economical conditions of our countries and their current situations. We were talking about nose surgeries (I saw 8 men and 8 women with a plaster on their nose during the first week in Iran only - and it seemed that a nose job for people with just a slightly specific nose shape was some kind of a social must, as well as a thick make-up for girls and an elaborate haircut for guys. Without that, others take you for something like a rebel or a deeply traditionalist person or a weirdo). We were singing songs in our languages and playing our musical instruments. We were talking about meanings of names in Farsi (this is something I really like - Iranian names have meanings people know, and parents usually care about them and don't pick names at random from the calendar as in our country.) We were cooking together. We learned that Vojta looked like an Iranian guy (we had been thinking so, since he had easily passed for a Turk or for a Georgian too) and Tahmineh even imagined a  Persian name for him. (We sticked with Timur, though, a nickname Vojta had started using in Turkey since nobody could retain or even pronounce his Slavic name). We were discussing how Iranian people can tell a foreigner on the street (usually thanks to unkempt haircuts and clothes of colours that don't fit together). We were joking about police making people pay fines for painted nails just in the summer because that's when the state budget needs extra income. We were discussing language systems and language learning. We learned that in Iran, guests are very important. They can show up unexpected and chances are high that their hosts will be home and will change their plans to be with them. It is also quite popular to use your guest as an excuse for not attending a family meeting or for not doing your school homework. When we told Tahmineh's family that in Europe, guests hardly ever come unexpected because people would be too busy to accept them or they probably wouldn't even be home, they were rather shocked and thought that Europeans had to be quite selfish and cold-hearted. We were sharing jokes popular in our countries. For several days, we were watching Iranian movies and Tahmineh never got tired of explaining some of the social realities that were too difficult for us to grasp. 

When I asked her what was her approach to religious rules and the hijab, she gave it a thought and answered: "I don't think God cares about clothes that much. I think that being a good person is good enough."

Eventually, she told us that she had always wished to be born somewhere else.
I normally think I am quite a cynical person but at that moment I found out I had tears in my eyes.

"Martyrs" - people killed in war. This was a general killed by DAESH.