07-06-2010

Hello there everyone,
It's Monday August 16th and I am sitting here in a HOT room in Rome at my camping hostel using a computer in the computer room that must be no joke 100 degrees at least. Maybe I should be out exploring Rome with my last 6 hours before leaving for the airport for Geneva or maybe I should go to the pool they have here and read or something and not be stare at a 15 inch screen. Maybe I should have actually gotten out of bed at 6a.m when I was awake and ready to go to the Vatican to see the Sistine chapel but then turned over and slept. I did get up early on Saturday to go see it but it was closed Sat/Sun for some holiday so I guess it was just not ment to be.

Whatever it is that I should "maybe" be doing, the truth is I just don't care because this is what I want to be doing right now. At this point of the trip with only 7 days left I have learned well enough to stop thinking about all the things I "should" be doing or didn't end up doing and do whatever it is I feel like. Anywho, I could blab on about a lot of things on my mind right now, a lot of which I actually did write for about 15 minutes but decide to make dissapear with the backspace button before replacing it with solely this sentence.

So without further adu (spelling?), I present you July 6th, 2010 [as we are over a month away from that time now I am relying HEAVILY on my journal enteries but I think they are fairly accurate.]:
We woke up and were going to my mom's friend's house for lunch. We planned to go on taxi and my mom hailed a taxi and negotiated the price to her friend's house before we got in. It may sound plain and not a big deal but when we first started the trip my mom was a lot more reserved and to me it almost seemed as though she was in a foreign country even though she spent most of her life in Iran instead of America so it was cool to see her getting her inner persian back. haha.
So we got to the house at about noon and it was my mom, my sister, the friend (female) the daughter of the friend, the mother of the friend, another one of my mom's friends (female), the mother of this other friend, aaaaaaand me (male)....YEAH.
This trip has definitely been HEAVILY female dominated and sometimes it is just awkward and weird specially since they see me as a grown up and a "man" and I see myself as a little kid. Obviously the mannerisms of the two are different and I sometimes I just wanna be a kid man. I don't think I will ever truly grow up or act completely grown up. I just like it better this way.

Anywho, we had lunch there and it was absolutely DELICIOUS.

[sidenote away from that day and back to August 16th. The food in Europe is good, even great, but the truth is it is just most of the time a more authetic version of the food you find in America. The food in Iran was different and that was one of my favorite parts of the trip]

Back to the food and the lunch: Iranians do parities a loooot diffferently than Americans. In America when you go to a party there is one or at most two types of food. You are having burgers, or pasta, or chicken, or steak and you have your vegetable. In Iran there is at least 5 different types of food at each table. There is your rice that has a bean or something in it and is stand-alone can be eaten. There is your white rice that has at LEAST one type of umm topping (khoresht), which has meat or chicken, to pour on top. Usually though there is two of these. And then there is salad, yogurt, and usually some oven roasted chicken pieces seperately by themselves. It is really a feast and full of various colors and options and flavors. SO AMAZING.

Anywho, we ate and the friend and her daughter did a great job of setting the table and bringing fruits and then bringing the lunch and then bringing the tea and dessert. In Iran EVERYTHING you do revolves around food it seems. It's odd but everywhere you go the entire time there is a different eating product being presented and if you refuse it they argue with you like you are anorexic and don't eat anything but it is mainly because they just fed you 9000 things over the last two hours and you are stuffed and you just can't have that fourth piece of cake or that 3rd orange or something. It's funny though and almost like a little game of constant offerings.

A random thing also this mom had AMAZING drawings and wood carved pieces and me and my sister chose a couple pieces of her work to take with us back to the states. I hope it makes it back because it is a neeeat little keepsakes.

After the food we had tea and listened to more stories of the corruption in Iran. I had brought this up earlier I THINK in another post with a different story possibly but this one was interesting also. It was about hospital nurses who get some money from the patients (like $50) and will keep them in private rooms by falsifying paper-works regarding an infection requiring her to be in a private room and stuff like that. Low level curroption seems to run rampid and a bit later that night when we were having guests over at my aunt's house for dinner and tea more wild stories came up. For example a cop who pulled over this friend and she tried to give her a $50 but he said no please put away and just gave her the ticket. And that doesn't sound like curroption but the fact that this is normal shows that maybe once, twice, three times the guy says no please put away but with his salary it will be so easy to eventually say "ok mam, now please don't speed" and then eventually "you know mam you can avoid the full ticket by paying now in cash instead of later" or something along those lines.

I donno. As I said, low level curroption seems to be everywhere and almost accepted. In America it seems that there is less of this low level curroption and more high level curroption (although that I am sure also exists in Iran).

Anywho, so back to that dinner+tea thing. Well yeah after we ate lunch at my mom's friend's house and had tea and talked and stuff we left and came back to my aunt's house where we had about 8-10 people come over for tea and dinner and more tea and talking. It was mostly my aunt's friends and they all seemed to remember me although I did not remember any of them. HOWEVER, there was this weeeird feeling of comfort and familiarity I had with them. I don't know if it was real or not but for people who I didn't remember at all SOMETHING felt like I knew them. Maybe I was just feeling extra social or something, but I don't think that was it.

Before the night ended the good family friends of ours, the ones we went to the villa in northern Iran with that I mentioned we grew up together and stuff, came over one last time because they were going to America for a visit. It was werid for me because when I was a kid and was leaving to America I truly had thought that I would never see them again and had cried and was sad. However, having them come to America last year and now me going to Iran a year later, saying bye to them was more of a see you later and I loved that feeling. The feeling that I will most likely see them again. I told the dad this and he said "Life goes and turns and twists and goes." And to you that may sound like rubbish but when I thought about it, maybe because of the emotions I was feeling then, it made a lot of sense.

Anywho, that is all I have for that day. I don't think I will be able to update this anymore as my last 7 days are PAAACKED traveling through 5 cities (Geneva, Interlaken, Vienna, Munic?, Frankfurth) and 3 countries (Switzerland, Austria, Germany) because I heard such good things about Interlaken that I had to try to squeez it in. And if you are following my twitter you know that I broke my iPod in Cinqqueterre so I can only write at PCs and not while on trains and while travelling to a place, which is my preffered way to update this blog as it doesn't take away from my time in a place.

SOOO, I will update this when I am back in America. I WILL, I promise.

I miss you guys from back home, you know who you are, and I love you guys and will see you very soon.
-NZ