Our first day in Tehran

This morning, I got to try on her my new outfit –a mantou. It’s very hot and the only way to deal with a full coat is by wearing very little underneath.
Breakfast buffet at the hotel. It was first come, first serve. By 7:45, there was no more food.
The Adazi Grand Hotel was the site of a convention as well as one of the first Trade Shows to hit Tehran, so the hotel was overrun with businesspeople. And, only 2 of the 4 elevators were working.
We changed $50 to rials…. 4400 rials to the dollar. By the size of the wad of bills, we were rich!
John got his newspaper fix buying a 200 rial “Tehran Times”…our source of news for the next 3 weeks. It was a lot of Iranian propaganda mixed with trivial news from Reuters, “Down with America” stories and U.S. football game articles.
We visited the Archeological Museum. Abgineh Museum of Glass and Ceramics (housed in the former Egyptian Embassy)
Lunch was at a local restaurant. Since it was Friday (their Sabbath), the restaurant was packed with people lined up 3 flights of stairs to get in. The food was good. It’s evidently one of the very few restaurants in Iran serving anything other than bland kabobs, eggplant, Zam-Zam fake coke and undrinkable alcohol free “beer.”.

Comments from our local guide, Cyrus:
* Japanese Tourists: They ask no questions, they just take pictures
* Italian Tourists: They ask lots of questions, but are very noisy.
* German Tourists: They come just because the Iranians are also Aryan and therefore, “they’re just like us”.
* We are “completely safe”…no one will bother you “unless their son was killed in a jihad”
We got to drive by the former US Embassy compound. No photos were allowed but they have an active business selling propaganda in English, including copies of secret documents painstakingly pieced together from the shredder of the Embassy.
Next on the agenda was the Carpet Museum. The carpets were beautiful and they had a gigantic Ayatollah rug…
Reza Abbasi Museum had the most wonderful collection of Persian miniatures and spectacular collection of ancient artifacts and illuminated manuscripts. The miniatures are painted with brushes made from the chin hairs of 2-week-old kittens. This is the same mindset that reconstructed the embassy documents, and that could build “the bomb.” Asian attention to detail makes the Germans look normal.
After a full day of museums, we stopped for a Zam-Zam and non-alcoholic beer in the hotel lobby. They can’t make fake beer, but the fake coke was surprisingly good.

Before our “introductory group dinner”, we decided to escape to the local amusement park across the street. Everyone in Tehran must have been there. We were the only non-Iranians and got a lot of smiles and laughs. We tried the “Rainbow” ride—a real stomach flipper. It was hysterical to watch the women in chadors going down the giant slide…they just hike it up and slide on down. This is the only amusement park we’d ever seen with a moving Ayatollah billboard and a mosque (the mosque was easy to find—it was directly under the giant squirrel’s tail!) I faced the challenge of hopping in and out of rides “in costume”. We saw our first (but not last) “Death to USA” sign on one of the rides. Strangely, the street level posters of Ayatollah Khomeni were usually defaced.
Then it was time for the mandatory “group dinner” at the hotel. We actually found some interesting characters on the tour. Nahman, an ex-Army Engineer Corp, in his 80’s who lived in Tehran in the 1950’s - back to see how things have changed since the Revolution. Rudy, a.k.a. “Herman the German”, in his 70’s, lectures on Islamic Architecture.

We learned about:
* “Bad Hejab”….and that our local guide checks the women’s clothing every morning to make sure that they don’t have “bad hejab”
* Jame Mosque (Friday mosque) – provides both spiritual instruction and secular “interpretations” for matters on earth. This is the basis of the clergy control of politics and public opinion. The mullahs (clerics) hold a position similar to Orthodox rabbis in Israel. A mullah’s status is a function of how many followers he has…a sort of informal democracy…they can rise as high as Ayatollah, or sink low enough to no longer be a mullah.
* Buses: Women and men are segregated…. women in the back of the bus. Interestingly, this policy is also being implemented on some bus runs in Israel.