Monday 7 September 2015

Discovering Iran #1



Iran has tickled my curiosity, and during the last few days before leaving Norway I could barely believe that I was actually going to come here. Ever since we started to fly to Izmir through Istanbul I’ve always noticed the Iranian women put on their headscarves in the passport control line at the Ataturk airport on their way back to Iran and it has always had me wondering what it is like in the country where these women come from.

So now that I got the opportunity to visit I had to use my chance, and so far I could not be happier!

I hardly did any research before going except for simply buying the Lonely Planet Iran book. I also  check ed a few essentials on tripadvisor including the dress code for women, whereupon I was reassured about foreigners not being expected to wear traditional clothing such as the chador (“tent” in Farsi) which basically covers the body from head to toe like a cloak. I was convinced that covering my hips with a tunic would be essential, preferably down to my knees and wrists along with bottoms that go down to the ankles
 In reality the local people really can’t be bothered with the way you dress as long as you put your veil on and avoid imposing your cleavage onto everyone else. The many times I’ve seen a police officer in the eye with my veil halfway wrapped around my head has caused no problems whatsoever, so the rules of dressing are pretty easy to follow really. That being said I was obviously overly self-conscious about my hair showing when I put on my scarf for the first time on the plane as we were descending for Tehran. The intense gaze of the lady at the passport control counter was not exactly helping either (but I got through without problems and would dance of joy as I went down the stairs to pick up m luggage if I could! [more on how women should behave in public will follow])  Now after almost two weeks it has actually become a routine to pick out the scarf that will colour-coordinate well with my outfit of that day, though I still ponder on the symbolism and meaning of wearing it every day…

So at the airport in Tehran I waited for my suitcase for a solid 30 minutes until sometime around 2am and made conversation with a girl around my own age straight away; originally Iranian living in Brussels on her way to work on some filming project in Tehran if I remember correctly. She gave me her phone number along with a warm welcome to Iran and the opportunity of meeting up for tea during my stay here.
Then as I walked through the arrivals hall I was almost immediately met by a girl asking if my name was Nil followed by her mother giving me a huge bouquet of flowers and offering to take the luggage I was carrying in both hands! This was my contact person Camellia who I’d been in touch with a few days earlier. Her lovely mother found me a place to exchange some money at the airport before heading towards the city in their car. The first thing that struck me on the highway was the license plates with Farsi numbers looking like they’d been typed with Comic Sans MS. Took me a few days to take these seriously…! And I’ll get back to the traffic culture and what the Lonely Planet guide has to say about it later!

Arriving at the student dorm was slightly confusing and Camellia’s help was absolutely essential as I soon came to realize that English speaking people over the age of 35 can be hard to find and that the security guard fell directly into this category. At last I was placed in a dorm room right before 4am was, to my surprise, me by a girl who happened to be Turkish. Slightly confused though very positively surprised, Sule welcomed me and showed me the vacant bunk bed above Heba, a Palestinian- Syrian girl who was spending the night at a classmate’s place when I arrived.

Sleeping like an actual rock that night I apparently  managed to ignore several attempts at people trying to wake me up for various reasons such as telling me that I should transfer to another room, needing to wake up to organize my student ID card as well as food-card for picking up lunch and dinner in the dorm canteen. Then my second contact person Elham (who actually managed to catch my attention) came to my room to introduce herself and let me know when I could start to attend the surgery ward at the hospital. I was so knackered that I completely forgot half of what she told me and went directly back to sleep and woke up again in the afternoon and found Heba sitting on the mat on the floor eating something that smelled pretty delicious for lunch.  
So the rest of the afternoon was spent on the floor getting to know Heba and Sule, eating whatever was available for lunch and drinking tea, because that’s what you do in Iran- you invite people for food and tea in your house, on your Persian carpet if you have to, and share everything with your guests. When they politely decline you insist that they must at least 2 or 3 times, and that’s what we call ta-arof, which is a big part of the Middle Eastern culture.

Later that evening Sule and I went out to meet some of the other incoming students. Being completely unaware of what we were going to do I barely managed to run down to the shower room for a quick wash before heading towards the boys dorm (as guys and girls are obviously not allowed to stay in the same student housing complex). After the grand round of handshakes and exchanging names we headed towards Park Laleh; a lovely park with high trees, fountains and paths to get lost in, almost like a maze in certain places. Here we met even more students, both incoming students (or just “incomings”) like myself and other Iranians.  The group thus kept getting bigger and I started to get the sensation that this is a perfectly standard Tehrani situation. You gather all your friends together with your friend’s friends and hang out altogether in big spaces taking selfies and hanging out before heading somewhere to eat. And that’s basically the definition of a good time.  I’m in awe at how friendly people are here, and also really enjoying that food is such a central part of the culture and always regarded as a reason to get together.


So naturally most of us decided to go for some nighttime dining and I got in a car with 4 other guys to a place I later found out was called Ab-o Atash Park (water and fire park). We met up with the rest eventually and had a long awaited Kete Kabab in the food court. Iranians love dining out late at night and finding a table to fit all 10+ of us was close to impossible but a little bargaining with the staff by our Iranian friends solved the problem eventually.


  After walking around the very impressive bridges connecting the park to a forest on the other side of the highway we went back to the dorms. I switched rooms because another incoming student was going to leave the next day to even out the numbers in each shared bedroom, so my new roommate was a really lovely Tunisian girl called Balkis and Nastaran from Tabriz (Iranian medical student now working as an intern). By the time I came back to the room there was a crowd of girls sitting on the carpet as Balkis had sliced an entire watermelon for everyone! Sule and I joined the circle that was formed around a large plastic sheet to protect the carpet from the fruit juice and we chatted into the night. I had a really fantastic first 24 hours in Iran and looking back at it now it’s amazing to see that the experience has only gotten better and better!

No comments:

Post a Comment