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

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Part 1, Deciding to Go to Iran

My wedding photo

My Iran Visa

Me at Persepolis

MY IRAN HONEYMOON (BY MYSELF)

 

PART 1, GETTING TO IRAN

 

“You going to Iran is like you traveling to Nazi Germany in the 30’s” was but one plea from the many interested parties trying to convince me not to travel to Iran.  This actual entreaty happened to come from my mother, who I placed in much distress twenty-some years prior when I was roaming Brazil and didn’t check in with her for over a month. She brings up that incident with a fair amount of regularity.

“You are gay, Jewish, and American you’re going to Iran?” asked many astonished friends. Yes, that was true, but only the American part could be easily documented, I explained.

“You’ve been to Israel so they won’t let you in, so why bother even trying to go” some people told me.  I’d heard about this, but had no Israel stamps in my current passport, as the last time I entered Israel was in 1990 so I figured there was no way the Iranian authorities would know about my ever being in Israel.

“Why would you support that horrible Iranian government that hates the U.S and Israel?” asked others. I explained that I was not travelling there as a show of solidarity with the government of Iran, but to see the country and get to know the people.

Instead of failing to convince me not to go to Iran, the worrywarts and the naysayers only made Iran seem more enticing. So I set about to purchase a ticket for September 11^th arriving on the 13^th in Tehran.  (The fact that I was departing the U.S. on September 11^th was truly a coincidence and totally unintentional, but my mother branded it “a slap in the face” even though we both knew that Iran had nothing to do with September 11^th.)

Before I describe my Iran trip as a gay American Jew, some background.  I had wanted to go to Iran for years. I’d seen Iranian films, had Iranian clients (I’m an immigration lawyer) and have some Iranian friends and liked to travel to places where Americans don’t go.  I lived in Chile during Pinochet’s regime, went to Colombia several times in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it was quite a dangerous place, visited Cuba in 2003 and Myanmar in 2006. So going to a country, where as a teenager during the hostage crisis I heard on a daily basis the chant/rant “death to America” piqued my curiosity. I knew that Iran was an ancient, historic and rich civilization and had tremendous sights, including Persepolis, which is one of the finest ancient ruins in the world. I also was aware that the Iranian people were very welcoming to foreigners, even Americans.

During the summer of 2014, I was getting a travel bug.  I had no travel plans except to attend my wedding in Massachusetts on Labor day weekend and wanted to travel beyond Worcester, MA.  Oscar, my now-husband, and I decided to finally get married after being together for 11 years and since my sister in Massachusetts was having a 50^th birthday party there over labor day, we decided to get married there.  The wedding was great – people came from all over, including Oscar’s family from Medellin, Colombia.

However, prior to the wedding, I was semi-secretly planning this trip to Iran. I found a travel agency which could get me a visa number and plan a trip for me.

As U.S. citizens, we can’t just take a passport and enter into Iran. You first need to find a travel agency.  The agency has to be approved by the Iranian government to sponsor Americans. The agency must arrange a trip plan, submit the itinerary to the Ministry of Exterior (Iran’s equivalent to the State Department), and the Ministry issues a visa number and then transmits said number to the Iranian Interests Section at the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington, DC.  Only after that, can you apply for the actual Iranian visa. The process appears daunting and is made me think of Lord of the Rings when Boromir spoke about the land of Mordor;

“One does not simply walk into Mordor. Its black gates are guarded by more than just Orcs. There is an evil there that does not sleep. The great Eye is ever watchful. It is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash and dust. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. Not with ten thousand men could you do this. It is folly.”

Getting into Iran proved way easier than getting into Mordor (but the pollution in Tehran was a poisonous fume for sure – more on that later).  I am not going to name the agency I used, nor the guide, because I do not want to expose any Iranians to any problems with their government due to what I am writing here.  This particular agency was able to obtain the visa number really quickly. When the agency emailed me that the visa number was available from the Ministry and that I could apply for the visa, I started to get cold feet. Am I really doing this? Isn’t this a dangerous extravagance?  Well, I thought, there was no harm in applying for the visa.  The worst that could happen is that the visa would be denied. And, I thought, even if they approve the visa there I don’t need to actually use it – I just stay home.  So, I sent my passport to the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington, DC with  a $90 money order in late July 30, 2014.  Then, I started planning the wedding party.

Around August 10^th I received my passport back with a visa from the Islamic Republic of Iran, single entry, valid for 3 months.  This was so much quicker than the stories of people I read about on line. I guess I have to go now, so I thought. Now my next chore was to buy the tickets.  Qatar Airlines started service from Miami in June 2014, which was a fairly convenient way of getting to Tehran.  You fly 14 hours from Miami to Doha, have a 5 hour layover and then Doha to Tehran, which is a 2-hour flight. The flight leaves Miami at 9:00 p.m., which left me plenty of time to go to work and then from my Brickell area office you take the Miami Metrorail to the airport. The ticket was cheaper than I thought – around $900 round trip.

The tour company mapped out the whole tour for me, with hotels, airplane and bus tickets. I was to start in Tehran and then fly south to Shiraz.  Then it was east to Kerman, then northwest, stopping in a desert Caravanserai, then in Yazd, Isfahan and Keshan before returning to Tehran.  The whole thing was about 2 weeks. I knew very little about those places and started looking into them.  I downloaded Lonely Planet and the Brandt Iran Guide.

My wedding was scheduled for August 29^th, and we were flying to Worcester on the 28^th with a Miami mini-entourage. That was exactly 2 weeks before my planned trip and I had to get the tickets by the 28^th in order to get the cheap price.  I was in a quandary as we drove to the Fort Lauderdale airport to board our Jet Blue flight to Worcester, MA for the wedding.  As I waited at the gate, with my husband-to-be, his sister, his niece and my best friend, I had a debate with myself – to go or not to go. The Qatar Airways app was open on my I-phone and all I had to do was press “purchase” and the deed would be done. If I didn’t press the button that evening, the price would probably double, I would have to cancel the trip, the Agency would cancel my visa and perhaps I would never see Iran. But if I did press the button, I would be committed to go there, or forfeit $900 plus the visa fee.

Just before boarding to Worcester, I pressed the purchase button. I would wait until after the wedding to tell Oscar that I would definitely be going on a honeymoon to Iran – by myself.  He knew I was thinking about going but didn’t know the extent to which I had advanced in the travel arrangements. Oscar lets me do what I want and doesn’t get upset when I do crazy stuff – that’s why he is such a great husband.

Now I had to go to my wedding.  It was small but awesome and will always be one of the best days of my life. At the wedding I told people about my upcoming Iran trip and they were pretty stunned. A friend told Oscar and we could make a new movie – “Not without my Husband,” and Oscar would be played by Sofia Vergara who comes running to Iran to rescue me.

Since the tour was plotted out for my by the agency, there weren’t a lot of preparations I had to make.  The only thing that I really needed to do was plan my reading material for the long bus rides and get a VPN. A VPN, or virtual private network, is a way for drug traffickers, child pornographers and Iranians to hide their IP addresses. What a VPN does is trick the internet into thinking that your computer is in a different place than where it actually is by registering with an IP address in another location.  Of course drug dealers and child pornographers want to hide their IP addresses to avoid getting caught by the law Iranians use them to make their computers think they are outside Iran so they can access blocked sites like Facebook and Twitter.  I needed a VPN because I had no idea what sites would be blocked.  If my email was blocked, I would be screwed because there was no way I just just disconnect myself from my clients and my office for 2 weeks. Plus, I wanted to use Facebook to post photos and videos of the trip. So I signed up with HIdemyass.com for a month. I read that it was one of the most reliable.  I did a home text by hooking into a Croatian IP address and 2 seconds later my Google homepage had changed from English to Croatian and my Youtube was broadcasting ads in Croatian (or is it Serbo-Croatian?).  Anyway, it worked and I now assumed that I could use my computer in Iran, with no problem.  That was not always to be the case.

Two weeks after the wedding, September 11, 2104, was my travel date.  I was equipped with $2,400 in cash to pay the tour company (You pay on arrival in Iran;  due to sanctions, there is no way to wire money there). I had an additional $2,000 in cash for expenses and emergencies. Miami International Airport was fairly quiet at 7:00 p.m. when I arrived.  I checked in, waited for no more than 5 minutes at the security line and went to the gate, passing through a couple of duty-free stores to spritz some cologne on myself before the 14 hour flight. At the gate, I saw what would be a first – a TSA agent (although it could have been CBP- I didn’t get a good look at the uniform) was asking questions to people boarding the aircraft.  I wasn’t sure if this was a Qatar thing or a September 11^th thing. He asked me where I was going and I said Iran and he asked why and I said for tourism and he let me pass. The immigration lawyer in my brain thought about questioning his regulatory authority to engage in this line of inquiry and whether I was required to answer.  After all, I was not entering the U.S., and I wasn’t suspected of any crimes. However, by the time he would have explained to me his regulatory authority in the CBP office, my Qatar Airways flight would have been over Virginia and I would still have been in the CBP office.  For that reason I rightly decided not to engage him.

14 hours later, I disembarked in Doha. The time was around 7 p.m. Friday.  My flight to Tehran wasn’t leaving until about midnight giving me some time to explore. Hammad International Airport looks brand new and is beautiful, staffed by a multi-national, multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-cultural workforce. Miami International looks like a bus station in comparison. It was a great airport to pass 4 hours in and re-charge my electronic devices but as my time drew to a close there, I was getting nervous. I knew that I could still turn around and go back to Miami. There was a flight back to the U.S. the next morning.  My nervousness increased on the long walk to the Tehran gate.  As I was walking I passed many gates to decent places – London, Vienna, Paris, Bangkok and I questioned by judgment.  Even the departure gates to Nairobi and Dar Es Saalam seemed way less forbidding than the place I was going to.  Would turning around and going back be the better part of valor?  My heart was pounding.

The Tehran flight was ready for boarding when I arrived.  It could have easily been a flight from Miami to Bogota – the people even looked Latin, and hardly a headscarf in sight, a big difference from the gates boarding to other Gulf States which were full of women in head-to-toe black abayas with only their eyes peeping out. I peeked at some of their passports and they all appeared to be Iranian. I couldn’t detect any Americans. I boarded the gate, got onto the bus, walked up the stairs to the plane, sat if my seat, fastened by seatbelt and the door shut.  I was really going to Iran and that was that.  It was done.  The flight was uneventful but before the gate opened in Tehran, the women adjusted their scarves. This was something of course I expected so I was not exactly shocked.  You have to be completely ignorant to not know that all women in Iran (and girls past the age of about 9), regardless of their religion, are required to wear “hijab” when in public. I soon learned that public meant basically everywhere except for the inside of your house and in sex-segregated spaces like the gym or the beauty parlor.

I disembarked in Imam Khomenei Airport and the first thought that occurred to me was that there is no U.S. embassy here and no bank system connected to the U.S. here, so if I lose my passport or get robbed, I’m fucked.  The only way out for me would be to do a Sally-Field-Not-Without-My-Daughter-run-for-the-Turkish-border.  The immigration line for foreigners was lengthy.  A line of Indians from a previous flight appeared to be wrapping up, but the going was slow. It took a good hour until it was my turn and by then the line for Iranians had already finished. The Immigration agent looked friendly enough but he didn’t speak English.  He kept saying “Indiana” to me, and after 3 “Indianas” I realized that he was looking at my place of birth, which on the passport says Indiana, USA. I told him I was born in Indiana but he didn’t seem to get it.  He got out of his booth and signaled me to follow him.  I was trying to not panic but in a flash I  pictured myself being taken to an Iranian holding pen in a cinderblock building somewhere along the perimeter of the airport.  Luckily, we only went as far has his colleague in the next immigration booth and the colleague appeared to chastise my agent saying something in Farsi like “you idiot – Indiana is in the USA.”  I guess he thought I was born in another country – India perhaps.  After that got cleared up, he stamped my passport and I was free to go.

Sigh of relief. I made it into Iran. Frodo’s entry into Mordor was way more complicated.  Now the fun starts.