“Bacon” sandwiches, 700-billion toman apartments and joyful sidewalk shoe shiners: it’s impossible to just walk for the sake of walking in the wealthy northern Tehran. Irony is everywhere.
Category: living in Iran
Millions of Iranians scramble to find smarter tools to circumvent new government censorship. But you need to already possess smarter tools to download new smarter tools. Iranian Catch-22. But Iranians already got Ph.D’s in circumventing barriers.
You think Joe Biden’s inflation is bad? “I go buy cough medicine for my kid. It’s now 25,000. I say, ‘my dear man, it was 15,000 this morning! How can this be?’”
Here in Mashhad, I’m subject to the rulers of Iran. Their wish is forcing me to remember the analog world.
And for that, well, I’m thankful.
I don’t care that IranAir has old planes, broken toilets and no AC in the middle of the summer. The entertainment makes up for it all. I’m on a 25-year-old Airbus A330 going from Frankfurt to Tehran and I’m about to witness an amusing replay of the Iranian cat and mouse. It’s ten minutes after..
It’s a joy to be just a tourist in Iran. Outsiders aren’t treated like treated as the irritating mobile cash machines who brave the streets of Rome and Paris and Barcelona. But to live in Iran, it takes time and nerves to find your routine. What the ef am I going to do for my zoom meetings with the crappy Internet over there? But then if Iran is so bad, what made me so happy when I live there? I ask myself. Gotta go back to find out.
Trying to get an Iranian driver’s license provides insight into why the country is a world leader in traffic fatalities. No one in Iran takes driver’s education seriously, not even the driving schools. This is a story about my time at a driving school in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city.