Jeremiah's Strange Times

Breakfast was easy:  cheese wrapped in flatbread.  Paying my bill was complex.  So devalued is the Iranian currancy that 1000 has its own shorthand, 'Toman' this mixes freely with other forms of standard and unspecified monetary slang and it was something I never really came to a full understanding of.  Here, on my first morning, I was at the beginning of that particular doomed ascent into comprehension and so for the first time of many, thought I understood it all completely.  I nodded  "Ah Yes, of course!" and strode out into the dusty alley. With only the tiny map on the back of the hostel's business card to work from I headed first away from and then towards the Metro.  It was still busy and it was still confusing.  At one crossroads I encountered a contented looking mime, while I glanced, alarmed at his static smile, a lady, half glimpsed, brushed close and left me with a bunch of white flowers.  She was gone before I got a chanc...

Deep in Tehran my party and I hit an intersection.   Across from us the street gave way to cobbles, along which and off to the right a square was cut into the linear streetscape. Here were set two platforms at right angles. Crowds milled and pushed about them. We nuzzled in to get a closer look.  The platforms were lined with moustachioed men with perfect hair. They gesticulated wildly.  One, a large man, who seemed to be in charge, looked at me and shouted a word I didn't catch or understand, I stared blankly and waved.  We saw now that it was an auction The crowd bid for gold coins which sat in cases like picture frames at the men's feet. Gold Coin Auctioneers We broke away and found, just beyond and beneath an old arch pointed like a leaf, a short stairway leading down to a street arched over - seething and stretching away to an interior horizon: a morass of colour filtered on a bed of chador black. Shoppers shuffling beneath rich banners in luminous g...

I was in Tehran, physically beaten,  spiritually ecstatic.  The sky hung above the courtyard, grey and tawdry, wind shook the tree in the corner, occasional drops of ashen rain fell to stain the page. I had set to writing, fueled with tea from a battered samovar, perched on a little table with insectile legs buckling; wrapped up in cling film beside it were flat bread piles and fig jam.  By default I was first to this breakfast buffet, others arrived gradually as the hour grew saner and before long I was scattily engaged in chat with a French student and an accountant from Amsterdam. Idle pleasant chat watching bedraggled folk emerge from dormitories upstairs, they stumbled in turn over a large pool of shoes that spread from the door almost to the samovar at which they clutched, sleep feverish. All then sat, chewed and sipped - joined the growing chat.  It was the simple ease of the hostel. All looked well traveled in well worn loose fitting woollens, fa...