Day 1 in Iran: Welcome to Tehran

Olive store in Tehran

Ice cream menu

Khomeini’s Tomb

DAY 1, WELCOME TO TEHRAN

I was the last person from my flight to get through Immigration so my luggage was all alone on the carousel.  I picked it up and went to Customs, and there was no officer there to inspect me.  So much for Iranian vigilance. I could have brought in 10 bottles of Bacardi and sold them to pay for my trip!  I looked for a driver and there he was –  standing in the waiting area holding a sign with my name on it. Praise Jesus!  I was slightly worried that this piece wouldn’t fall into place but it did. I went with him outside into the chilly Tehran 5:00 a.m. morning. I got into the cab and we left the airport.

10 minutes into the increasingly harrowing cab ride, I saw a gleaming structure surrounded by lights with buses parked in front.  Why are all those buses there at 5 a.m? I tapped the driver’s shoulder and gestured to it, and he told me what it was but the only word I understood was Khomeini, and I instantly realized that it was Khomeini’s tomb – yes that Khomenei, the one who held our hostages, made Ronald Reagan president and forced Salman Rushdie into hiding for, 12 years  – or more maybe? A fitting introduction to the country and seen by virtually every traveler going from the airport to central Tehran.

The cabbie was driving like a madman.  He swerved past a car and gave the old lady driver (yes women drive in Iran) the Iranian equivalent to the finger. He weaved in and out of lanes and barreled through the Tehran expressways at about 130 kms per hour and I was freaking out wondering if this guy was on meth (do they have meth in Iran?) and thinking that this dude is going to fucking kill me and there’s no American embassy to ship my body back home. Now Sofia Vergara was going to come to Iran not to rescue me but to identify my corpse for shipping it home in a body bag. After many more cab rides in Iran, I would fondly remember this as one of the more relaxing rides in a country of lunatic drivers. We lurched into the hotel driveway 45 minutes later and all I wanted to do was sleep.

The staff at the Hotel Esteglal were a bit on the surly side and made me pay for a half a day but I willingly paid because I hadn’t been in a bed for 48 hours and was exhausted. They kept my passport, which I was nervous about at first, but that is a thing they do in Iran.

This used to be the Tehran Hilton, and  the lobby looked like the type of place where the Shah and Brigitte Bardot drank Harvey Wallbangers and danced the hustle in 1977. During the 1979 Islamic Revolution the hotel was nationalized, renamed the “Esteglal” which means “Independence,” and it looked like it had been preserved in amber ever since. Except for the large framed photos of the 2 Ayatollas – Khomeini and Khamenei – right above the main entrance threshold, and the large sign pointing to the prayer room.  This wasn’t the scowling Khomeini that we used to see growing up but a semi-smiling one, who, if you squinted hard enough, could even be your stern but soft-hearted Grandpa. It was now about 7 a.m. and I had 5 hours until I was to meet the guy from the agency who would take my money.  I slept.

At noon, the phone rang and it was the agency guy.  I went downstairs and handed over my cash.  He told me that my guide Lina (not her real name) would be meeting me at around 2 p.m., giving me 2 more hours of sleep.  Lina rang me at 2 and said “hello, this is Lina your guide.  I’m downstairs.”  I went down and a very pretty petite woman with a cotton headscarf covering about half of her hair and a short “manteau” came up to me and asked if I was Mister Barry.  I told her I was and she introduced herself.  I was happy that my guide was a woman because I wouldn’t have to worry about dealing with a straight man’s macho comments and questions about my sexuality.  I would be spending a good part of the next 12 days with Lina so I was hoping that we would get along.

The reason I would spending so much time with Lina was because Iranian law requires us Americans to be accompanied, or minded as some would say, at all times. This means if you follow the letter of the law, you cannot step outside your hotel without the guide at your side, but I soon realized that these rules are far from strictly adhered to and I was able to freely wander as much or as little as I wanted.

Lina told me that we were going to walk around the north of Tehran and get something to eat. We got to the first intersection outside our hotel, which looked like the intersection of 2 giant expressways smashed into a single traffic circle.  This was the junction of the Chamran Highway, a major east-west expressway and Valiasr Street, the longest north/south avenue in Tehran.  Crossing this intersection was my first lesson in the Tehran Shuffle. This is the dance you perform crossing the street in Tehran, and to a certain extent in other Iranian cities.  Iran is the most pedestrian unfriendly place I’ve ever visited and that includes Texas. The drivers just don’t give a fuck about pedestrians because they’re too busy fighting each other.  So, in order to make your way through an intersection as a walker, you just have to forget everything you take for granted in the U.S., like having a “walk” signal or waiting for a driver to motion for you to pass, or assuming that pedestrians have the right-of-way, or thinking that you won’t die.  You have to confront your fears of being roadkill, and then, channeling Mr. Magoo with a combination of bravado and blindness, you venture out into the traffic, shuffle between the moving cars, holding your hand towards the oncoming traffic in a “stop” gesture, as if that hand had telekinetic powers to actually stop the cars that are barreling towards you, until you have made it to the tiny traffic island or median strip where you regain your composure and fortify yourself for the 2^nd half of the intersection.  I found that doing the Tehran shuffle with a group of Iranians was more reassuring than doing it on your own and by letting them go slightly ahead of you, it gave them a greater chance of being hit first, which would likely soften the blow to you, unless you strayed too far back and got clipped from behind. I found it illuminating that the Iranian government pays so much effort to enforcing hijab, but very little to enforcing traffic laws.  It took me the entire 14 days to perfect my Tehran shuffle, but at the end I was kind of enjoying the thrill.

As we walked north on Valiasr Street, a lovely sycamore-lined street with rivulets from the mountains flowing along its embankments, we got to know each other a bit.  She was from Shiraz, had studied ancient Persian languages and literature at the University of Tehran and had been a tour guide for 6 years.  She was authorized to take Americans based on her experience and credentials, and not all tour guides had such authorization.  I thought it was pretty cool that she had the ancient Persian background and it did prove very helpful throughout the trip. Her English was fluent, but formal and I learned that she liked having Americans because we helped her with her American English, unlike Chinese or German groups whose English wasn’t native. She told me that Iranians preferred to speak American English, as opposed to British or Australian.

We went to a mini-bazaar and I bought dried fruit and olives in pomegranate puree, and then went to an ice cream store where I tried saffron ice cream, a Tehran thing. So far, Tehran was pretty cool.

The first thing that any foreign visitor to Tehran notices, aside from the horrible traffic, was the variety of hijab.  Lina told me that hijab was not the word for just a headscarf, but refers to the entire body covering. What hijab was in the north of Tehran was the scarf plus a manteau. In more conservative areas it was the black chador and there was lots of in-between. The women in the north of Tehran seemed to push hijab to the limits by knotting their hair into a bun, then anchoring the scarf on it so it perched as far back on the head as possible, thereby exposing all their front hair. The manteau is the covering that is meant to hide the curvature of the body and is supposed to drape low enough to cover the rear end.  However, many women I saw had their manteaux tightly belted, showing as much curvature as they could. I think the general rule is that the scarf and manteaux are supposed to be plain and drab but many north Tehran women’s coverings were just the opposite; brightly colored, Burberry, and Louis Vuitton even Romero Britto, the tacky Miami faux artist who I hate.  I started my trip with a curious attitude towards hijab, then at times attempted to respect it as a cultural thing, but devolved into hating hijab.

We walked all over northern Tehran, many parts of which had an aura of faded elegance. There were some faintly Parisian-style buildings and others that looked like they could have been in Madrid or Buenos Aires and lots of big modern high-rises.  But they were punctuated by vacant storefronts and many partially built structures that looked like construction was suspended on them months or years prior. Lina was teaching me the Persian numbers, which were the same as Arabic ones.  I never quite learned them.

We ended up where Tehran met the mountains in what had been a village, but was now fully enveloped by the city and a place where Tehranis come to eat and shop. We ate at a restaurant there where I had the first of my many lamb kebabs. During our conversation, I made the big Jew reveal and Lina was really cool about it saying that Shiraz where she is from, has the biggest Jewish community in Iran.  Now, I’m a 100% atheist and have no interest in practicing religion so I qualified it by saying that I was completely not-religious and she said “me too,” which was cool of her. I was getting more and more confident about being with this woman for the next 2 weeks.

We finished dinner and we had to split up because she was staying in Central Tehran and I was going to walk back to my hotel.  Just before she stepped into her cab she issued this warning:

“People here are really curious about foreigners – don’t tell them you’re American.”

“Huh?”

“Tell them you’re from France.”

“Bu what if they try to speak to me in French?”

“Hardly anybody here speaks French.”

“What about if I tell them I’m Canadian – isn’t that a bit more plausible?”

I wasn’t sure if she was doing this for my protection or so that she wouldn’t get into trouble for leaving her American charge alone on the streets of Tehran, but I had promised my family before I left to follow the orders of my guide during the trip, so we both agreed that my fake nationality for my walk home would be Canadian.  Like in Argo. And as I was walking home I honed by Canadian persona.  I decided to not be from Montreal in case someone knew French; I wouldn’t be from Toronto because there were too many Iranians living there; I had never been to Edmonton, Winnipeg or Halifax so those were out; I had read The Shipping News so Newfoundland came to mind but in the end I chose Vancouver.  But I never got to use my pretend Canadian identity because the only contact I had during that walk was with some lost guy who, thinking I was Iranian, asked me directions in Farsi, to which I replied with an I-don’t-have-any-idea shrug.  I then resolved to not conceal my identity for the remainder of the trip, and suffer the consequences, whatever they may be.  Anyway, one of the main points of this trip was to see Iran as an American so pretending to be Canadian seemed, kind of beside the point.

I got back to the Esteglal and went to my room where I proceeded to struggle with the wifi, a recurring theme throughout the trip.  I’ve experienced slow wifi, but this was as bad as dial-up in the 1990s.  I managed to get onto Facebook with the VPN on my laptop but couldn’t connect on my I-phone, even though the VPN icon appeared on the screen. But it was the sluggishness of the wifi that was exasperating.  I assumed that it was just the location of my room but I soon discovered that all of Iran has slow bandwidth.  I figured out that the wifi was slightly stronger in the bathroom so I set up shop there for a new minutes. I attempted to upload some photos to Facebook but it wasn’t working. I was tired anyway and as my photos were uploading, I dozed off watching upload circle spinning on my screen

Tehran traffic

.