When I told some of my friends that Katherine and I were embarking on a trip to Iran, the responses invariably ranged from ‘Why?’ to ‘Is it safe?’ I did not have any concern about our safety because as long as the US is bogged down in Iraq it is extremely unlikely that Iran would be bombed and for us to be held hostages. Now we have returned from a very enjoyable journey over there, I can answer the ‘why’ part by saying ‘why not’ and adding that because it is a land of ancient and rich history with magnificent archeological splendors and natural beauty where people are friendly and yearning for outside contacts, especially with the Americans.
Including us two hillbillies from Tennessee, there were 18 members in our group coming from various places and having very diverse backgrounds. California has the largest contingent of five: a couple the wife works in Asia Museum and the husband has a physics Ph.D. in high energy from Stanford but later worked very successfully as a business consultant, three ladies including an artist doing oil paintings, a DJ as well as a newspaper employee, and the third a curator of a gallery; a pair from Florida, the lady was a some-time actress who had appeared in a couple of films and TV commercials while the gentleman was an optometrist turned historian and theater critic; a seasoned lady traveler from Colorado who is associated with the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet Company; a lady from Missouri has a degree in journalism but turned teacher and later became a business lady after the passing of her husband; a couple from New York State the wife used to be a dean in a college and the husband has just retired from the presidency of a college in Vermont; a lady from D.C. who got the B.S. in chemistry from Vanderbilt University in Nashville and received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Duke but later worked with computer and library; a guy from Virginia who used to work as an analyst for the Defense Intelligence but had made all the wrong predictions on the Tiananmen Square events in China (his own jesting confessions!); two retired scientists from Switzerland who had made significant contributions in their own fields of research in life sciences; and an Australian lady who was an experienced Washington watcher monitoring and analyzing US agricultural and trade policies for their effects on her country but is currently enjoying her retired life in Italy. This talented and adventuresome group was further accompanied by a retired professor of archeology from Texas (who had done some archeological diggings in Iran years ago) serving as a trip scholar to enrich us on what we were witnessing, a young Brit served as our trip escort who has recently returned from his tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan with one book already published on his experience there and is currently writing another book on travel, and an Iranian national guide who was very animated and made frequent recitations of Persian poems during our long bus rides.
Welcome to Tehran: a rude awakening and recompense.
In the plane from Frankfurt to Tehran I decided to preset my watch to the local time in Tehran so I asked the German stewardess (we were flying Lufthansa) and was told to be a 2 ½ -hour difference. I guess the ½ hour is a way of showing the world that the Iranian government is not bound by the international time-zone convention of using the hour as the unit of time change! As the plane was approaching the Tehran airport (Imam Khomeni Airport, IKA) the female passengers were advised to honor the local custom by wearing head scarves. It was the first time that all the ladies in our group had scarves on their heads and looked a bit strange as well as hard to distinguish one from the other.
The plane landed in Tehran around 1:40 a.m. and we followed the crowds to the immigration area upon deplaning. We initially queued on the lines designated as ‘foreigners’ which were considerably longer than those for the ‘Iranians’. So when the ‘Iranians’ lines were cleared we were instructed to go to these gates. That was our mistake to have made the switch because the officers at those check points seemed to be less experienced in dealing with travelers holding foreign passports. And when they saw our US passports they went to consult with someone else and we were eventually led to a table for finger printing! To most people in our group this was their first time being finger-printed like criminals. Katherine was so incensed and visibly upset, so I had to calm her down by telling her that was how the US government treated Iranians coming to the States and the Iranian government was simply reciprocating. It took about an hour for the custom to clear our group because copies of our finger prints along with the passports had to be hand-carried to the main office to have them Xeroxed. I suspect those photocopies would eventually end up in a trash bin because some people in our group coming through the ‘foreigners’ checkpoints were not finger printed, apparently it was rather arbitrary. Anyway we were bused to our hotel before dawn to catch a few hours of sleep before our first sight-seeing in Tehran.
Our ‘humiliations’ were somewhat recompensed by the sightseeing tours of Tehran after breakfast that began with a visit to the National Museum of Iran which amasses an impressive collection of fine ancient artifacts as well as Persian art. In the afternoon we went to view the spectacular Crown Jewels, housed in the vaults of the Bank Milli of Iran. The crown jewels of Iran could be said to be the largest, one of the most dazzling and valuable jewel collections in the world. Most of the items in the magnificent collection dated back to the Safavid dynasty which ruled Iran from 1502 to1736 AD. The Peacock Throne (among many other spectacular jewelry pieces) is unbelievable in its stunning beauty and craftsmanship.
In the evening we enjoyed a welcome dinner amidst the live Iranian music performed by a musician at the small but elegant Sofreh Khaneh Restaurant in the Laleh Inter-Continental Hotel where we stayed. Whatever transpired at the airport in the early morning seemed to have been forgotten by then!
It’s a small world!
It turned out the couple from the New York State actually reside in Rhinebeck which is only a 10-minute drive from Melvin’s house and they had actually attended concerts at Bard. As a matter of fact we and Karin took Milo to a kid’s playground and had lunch in that charming town only one day prior to our departure for Iran. During the trip the husband told me that when he was still the president of a college in Vermont and when Howard Dean (the current Democratic National Chairman) was the governor of that state he was invited to join the governor on a trade mission to Taiwan. During a banquet two of the Taiwanese officials making speeches mentioned that they were the graduates of the summer language programs of his college. What a small world indeed and what a proud president deserving his sense of accomplishment!
The queen of airport misfortunes!
The lady from Missouri is in the fire equipment business and would invariably inspect the fire safety outfits of every building we visited! She seemed to have the most misfortunes during the domestic flights in Iran. Because of the rigid inequality of sexes in the Islamic world, men and women have to go through separate security checkpoints at airports. So when the ladies in our group were going through the security gates they were on their own, devoid of the benefit of assistance from our male Iranian guide for translation. The lady from Missouri wore a pacemaker which could trigger and shut down the security system if she passes through the electronic detection gate. So she adamantly refused to go through the security door but the female guard not knowing what a pace-maker is insisted on her passing through the gate. After a period of awkward stand-off, shouting, and confusion it was eventually resolved by her asking our Iranian guide to write a note and show it to the security guard. Another time she placed her expensive camera with a big zooming lens attached onto the security conveyer belt but when she went picked up her stuffs at the other end the camera was mutilated because it got trapped to the cleavage at the end of the conveyor! There was nothing she could do but to pick up the pieces and hoping her insurance back home would cover the damage. Fortunately she had another camera which is digital but not as sophisticated as the other one. Despite those misfortunes, she actually quite enjoyed the trip and later wrote a piece on her impression of Iran which was published in The Kansas Dispatch praising the friendliness of the Iranian people without mentioning those incidents. And would you believe that upon returning to JFK she failed to locate her checked luggage and she had to catch a connecting flight at LGA to get home! We later heard that someone in our group had mistakenly carried her luggage off! What a lady and what an adventure!
My own (mis)adventure at an Iranian airport.
I usually made a habit of paying homage to the restroom shortly before boarding a plane in an effort to avoid going to the tiny toilets on the airplane during flights. While waiting to board our first Iranian domestic flight in an airport, I decided to walk around and search for a toilet. Then I saw a ‘gentlemen’ sign prominently displayed so I walked through it but was stopped by a smiling security guard asking for my boarding pass. I was a bit baffled wondering why a boarding pass was needed for peeing but I dutifully returned to my seat and promptly extracted my boarding pass and showed it to the guard whereupon he let me through without any difficulty. But to my infinite consternation there was no toilet in sight and then it suddenly daunted on me that I had just passed through the security checkpoint to go into the boarding area and the ‘gentlemen’ sign was meant as a security gate for the male passengers and not the toilet for men!
Oh, oh, oh my God!
The gallery lady from California actually is quite well-versed in Persian arts and archeology and is in fact planning to write a book about the trip. The book was partially completed with excellent historical background already written and for the traveling parts to be added after the trip. I had the good fortune of borrowing the draft and reading some of it during our long bus rides which enhanced immeasurably my appreciation of what we were seeing on the tour. This lady was very animated and would cry out ‘Oh, oh, oh my God’ upon witnessing a magnificent sight and got us all excited. Her exclamations no doubt were partially responsible for my taking so many pictures, around 1000 (memory cards are cheap these days)!
The Iranian peach ice cream!
One day on our bus trip to a destination we stopped for lunch at a huge rest-stop which houses a variety of shops. After the lunch we moved to a coffee shop for some coffee and ice creams. The gentleman from Florida ordered a peach ice cream and we were all stunned when the server presented him with three big scoops of vanilla ice cream sitting on a beautiful wide-mouthed and narrow necked glass while about a dozen pieces of freshly-sliced peach hung on the rim of the glass. It was so gorgeous and appetizing which inspired us to spontaneously sing out ‘happy birthday to you’ to the lucky gentleman! I believe the Iranian-style ice cream could be a big hit in the States!
Our resident carpet consultant.
The physicist turned business consultant has traveled extensively and is very knowledgeable about carpets so he served as our resident carpet expert by default, as there were several people in the group interested in purchasing Persian carpets as souvenirs. He had all kinds of carpet images stored in his i-phone and would show us those images which-ever-ways via finger-rubbing the screen. His advices were instrumental in the acquisitions of several beautiful carpets by the group members and their headaches at the airport on the means of transporting them. His wife with her colorful outfit was a huge hit with the Iranian high school girls we met during the tour.
The blunt-talking American.
The guy from Virginia who had ‘misjudged’ the situations in China is actually quite intelligent, with a master’s degree in international relations from Georgetown and his straight-talking style is quite refreshing. Whenever we arrived at a new place he would dress very casually and go into town by himself to mingle and feel the pulse of the locals. Here are a couple examples I had the privilege of witnessing. One time I was nearby when our Iranian guide was apologizing to him about something then I heard the reply: “don’t worry; you will still get my tips!” Another morning we were sitting down and having buffet breakfast together, this guy from Virginia being a bit self-conscious about his bulging belly was murmuring that he shouldn’t eat too much and immediately our Iranian tour guide advised him to eat just citric fruits and nothing else every morning. The Virginian was a bit nonplus and said “You begin to annoy me, is there anything you don’t know?” It was hard for me to tell if he was jesting or in earnest!
A Chinese cooking class in Hong Kong.
The two scientists from Switzerland actually spent some times during their younger years at Washington University in St. Louis during its golden years when several future Nobel Prize winners were doing research there including Stanley Cohen (Katherine worked for him at Vanderbilt for years until his retirement). One time his wife was invited to attend a conference of her specialty in Hong Kong and the husband decided to tag along, most of the time it was the other way around. During the scientific sessions he was on his own and got bored, so he decided to sign up for a Chinese cooking class. Apparently it had benefited him greatly and now he can cook delicious Chinese dishes to pamper his ever-smiling and loving wife!
Have ‘Lonely Planet Guidebook’ will travel.
The serious and intellectual nature of our group was reflected by the fact that during the long bus rides and between the Persian poem reciting sessions of our Iranian guide, almost everyone was reading the Lonely Planet Guidebook on Iran. Sadly we two hillbillies seemed to be the only ones without the guidebook and yet we were the most ignorant about the ancient Persia. So to fill our ignorant void we decided to purchase a copy at one of the hotel bookstores near the end of our trip! We were still reading it months after returning home! You can be sure we will have a Lonely Planet Guidebook in our backpack next time we travel abroad!
A ruder awakening in our own country!
Irwin came to JFK to welcome us back to the US soil and took us to Aya’s newly acquired apartment. After resting for two nights in NYC we were anxious to go home and resume our daily tennis playing. We had to go to the Newark International Airport to catch our flight back to Nashville. Being a miser and not willing to spend $100 for the taxi fare, I decided to take the subway to Grand Central Station and then transfer to the New Jersey Transit train which has a stop at the airport. Despite the two pieces of moderate-sized luggage, I managed to negotiate the subway stairs and reached the train heading for the airport at the last minute. As soon as we got onboard the train started to move. Hurriedly we walked along the aisle in search of seats, with Katherine in front and me immediately behind struggling with the two pieces of luggage. Despite my daily tennis playing I dared not risk lifting the heavy trunks up onto the luggage racks overhead lest my 70-year-old bones get fractured. So we were searching for some empty rows for our butts or the luggage to sit on. Although the train was relatively full and mostly occupied by the European tourists returning home after happy shopping sprees in the Big Apple (taking full advantage of the weak dollar!), we managed to find at the very front of the railcar one empty row on each side of the aisle. The one on the right was facing a row occupied by a lady while the one on the left had a folder placed on the window side apparently belonging to the man wearing sun glasses and sitting in front of it. Since the man did not retrieve his folder to offer us the row, we decided to sit on the row in front of the lady and placed the trunks right next to the rows without completely blocking the passage way. Soon a woman conductor appeared to check our tickets and she suggested that I place one luggage onto that empty row with the folder on the side. I complied but in the process the luggage touched the rim of the folder. Immediately the man retrieved his folder and said in a loud voice that I should not have touched his folder. So I said ‘sorry’ but he continued to rant. Then the conductor returned to me and told me to pay no attention to him which made him ranting even more loudly saying that I should be worried because he knew so and so, probably the name of a gang leader! I ignored him but stared intently at the luggage so that I could lunge at it (in case the train made a sudden deceleration) to prevent it from landing on the guy and starting WWIII! Fortunately he disembarked the train one stop ahead of us. I felt bad for being instrumental in showcasing such vulgarity in full view of the returning foreign travelers. It is also ironic that we had been treated better by the people in a country whose government is hostile to the US than by our own fellow countryman! With heavy hearts we returned home and the next day woke up early to go to the tennis courts, and we were happy campers once more!
