The Portuguese pennies, or reis (pronounced rays), are prodigious. It takes one thousand reis to make a dollar, and all financial estimates are made in reis. We did not know this until after we had found it out through Blucher. Blucher said he was so happy and so grateful to be on solid land once more that he wanted to give a feast—said he had heard it was a cheap land, and he was bound to have a grand banquet. He invited nine of us, and we ate an excellent dinner at the principal hotel. In the midst of the jollity produced by good cigars, good wine, and passable anecdotes, the landlord presented his bill. Blucher glanced at it and his countenance fell. He took another look to assure himself that his senses had not deceived him and then read the items aloud, in a faltering voice, while the roses in his cheeks turned to ashes: “‘Ten dinners, at 600 reis, 6,000 reis!’ Ruin and desolation! ‘Twenty-five cigars, at 100 reis, 2,500 reis!’ Oh, my sainted mother! ‘Eleven bottles of wine, at 1,200 reis, 13,200 reis!’ Be with us all!”

“‘TOTAL, TWENTY-ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED REIS!’ The suffering Moses! There ain’t money enough in the ship to pay that bill! Go—leave me to my misery, boys, I am a ruined community.”

I think it was the blankest-looking party I ever saw. Nobody could say a word. It was as if every soul had been stricken dumb. Wine glasses descended slowly to the table, their contents untasted. Cigars dropped unnoticed from nerveless fingers. Each man sought his neighbor’s eye, but found in it no ray of hope, no encouragement. At last the fearful silence was broken. The shadow of a desperate resolve settled upon Blucher’s countenance like a cloud, and he rose up and said:

“Landlord, this is a low, mean swindle, and I’ll never, never stand it. Here’s a hundred and fifty dollars, Sir, and it’s all you’ll get—I’ll swim in blood before I’ll pay a cent more.”

Our spirits rose and the landlord’s fell—at least we thought so; he was confused, at any rate, notwithstanding he had not understood a word that had been said. He glanced from the little pile of gold pieces to Blucher several times and then went out. He must have visited an American, for when he returned, he brought back his bill translated into a language that a Christian could understand—thus:
10 dinners, 6,000 reis, or $6.00
25 cigars, 2,500 reis, or 2.50
11 bottles wine, 13,200 reis, or 13.20

Total 21,700 reis, or $21.70

Happiness reigned once more in Blucher’s dinner party. More refreshments were ordered.

From Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

Using money in Iran felt something like this. The first day at the hotel I changed US$100 (having been told that Ben Franklins were the best way to bring money into the country) and walked away from the counter a millionaire.

While Iranian money (called the rial) started out at a fairly sane exchange rate in 1979 (I bought a stamp from 1981 that was 20 rials for a domestic envelope) there has been terrible inflation since then (official numbers put inflation at 17% annually, private estimates put it at more like 20%-22%) and when we were there it was just short of 10,000 rials to the dollar. Presenting bills in such numbers is rather inconvenient, so most business is done is tomans. There are 10 rials to the toman, however when the numbers being discussed are in the thousands of tomans, the word “thousand” is often elided.

As if this confusion over units of counting weren’t enough, the largest note in print (and it has existed for only a few years) is a 20,000 rial note (worth a little more than two dollars). My wallet spent most the trip in a state of being unable to fold up properly due to the wads of cash. Some banks have started printing notes which our tour guide described as “kind of like traveler’s checks” for such useful sums as 2,000,000 rials (a little over two hundred dollars) that he used to pay for dinners at restaurants for our party of 13.

All joking about massive sums of money aside, the economy in Iran is actually quite messed up. Price increases are far outstripping wage increases, and property, especially in the big cities and most especially in Tehran, is available only to heirs and the very rich.

I’ll write more about the economy later, and maybe even get my friend Walter (he has a University of Chicago Economics degree and a love for travel) to provide some expert thoughts.

Categories: Iran, 2007
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The West’s view of social issues in Islamic countries tends to be very tied up in the veil. This is only perpetuated by the media, whose iconic (and at times, seemingly, only) picture of Iran is a woman in a black chador standing in front of a mural saying “death to America” (of which there are three in all of Tehran) or depicting Ayatollah Khomeini.

In fact veils are quite diverse in Iran. While covering one’s head is compulsory for women outside the home, there is very little in the way of guidelines about how. There are four main types of head covering that one sees:

• The chador. This is basically a big piece of cloth, most often black, but which can be any color or pattern. The chador is fitted around the head and then wrapped around the body, extending all the way down to the calves. It’s really quite difficult to explain without a picture. Almost all women who work for the government where a uniform chador.
• A pre-folded scarf, often with elastic, that one pulls over one’s head like a ski mask. It drapes over the shoulders and requires no fussing or pinning.
• A long scarf that is laid over the top of the head and then wrapped once around the neck.
• A square scarf, folded in half into a triangle, with the two folded corners tied under the chin.

The last three must be paired with a manteau, a long jacket that comes at least to mid-thigh and hides any body shape. The last two, it should be noted, do not cover all hair. Bangs always stick out a bit, and some younger women will wear a square scarf very far back on their head, like this. Wearing a scarf too far back can result in a visit from the moral police, however.

Being stopped by the moral police is capricious and can mean a number of different things. Sometimes they just want a tip. Sometimes they will just give a scolding, and sometimes they will send women to jail for a night. Occasionally, though, the tables are turned, as one of our tour guides related to us one night at dinner.

My grandmother was out going shopping this afternoon. She was wearing a chador–she’s very religious, but not politically religious–and she came across the moral police who had stopped a young woman for having her scarf too far back. She started yelling at the police, telling them ‘Why are you bothering her?! Why don’t you go worry yourselves about the price of vegetables!’ And they went away.

It’s comforting to know that even the Iranian moral police are capable of being scolded by a righteous grandmother.

Categories: Iran, 2007
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I have been back from Iran a week now, but it has been a busy week.

The flight home went off without a hitch. No extra inspections at customs, despite importing a Persian rug, which are subject to special rules. I spent two days at home and then continued on my westward journey to Chicago, where my new apartment waited for me. Since then, I’ve been:

• unpacking (my books have multiplied so that I’ve now been assigned my own six-foot-tall, three-foot-wide bookshelf in the living room)
• rearranging the apartment (we think the television does not need to be the center of the living room)
• shopping (there is a very cheap and very good produce store a block away from my house!)
• working at my job at Residential Computing

Consequently there has not been much time for thinking, writing, or organizing of pictures. However, it is a story that needs to be told. I think it will come in snippets, sometimes without pictures, for a while, because the richness of the experience defies any comprehensive treatise. There are portraits, tableaus, and landscapes, short stories and long narratives, reflections and analyses. And photographs; about six hundred of them.

My goal is to post a few bits every day.

Categories: Iran, 2007, Other
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I leave for Iran tomorrow. I won’t get there until Monday, but the trip is starting. Quite simply I don’t know what to expect. Last summer I wrote this before going to Jordan for the first time. Now that Madaba feels so familiar, I think that the same sentiment might be far better applied to Iran. How far is Iran from us?

Categories: Iran, 2007
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I leave for Iran on Saturday. I won’t get there until Monday, but that’s not the only way in which Iran is very far away from this part of the world. I’ve spent many a night learning about all the different ways in which Iran is isolated, and wondering what other ways I will discover when I arrive.

My first hint of Iran’s isolation came at our first group meeting in May (I am traveling with a group from the University of Chicago to learn about religion and human rights, all while masquerading as—and in many cases, actually being—tourists.) Iran, we were told, is not connected to the international banking system. Credit cards, ATM cards, and traveler’s checks from outside Iran would not work. Instead, we should bring enough cash with us to pay for everything for the entire trip. The banks generally like dollars or euros. What a royal pain in the neck. I’m going to the store tomorrow to buy a money belt, in which I can carry my portraits of Ben Franklin. (I was once paid a not insignificant amount of money in cash while abroad and had to carry it in my wallet in my pants pocket through Heathrow and Kennedy airports as well as several dozen blocks of Manhattan before I was able to deposit it. I am not eager to have that feeling again.)

My next discovery came as I was talking to my parents about emergency contact information. They wanted to know if they could call me. I reassured them that the tour guide, whose cell phone number they have, speaks English and that the hotels, whose phone numbers they also have, are supposed to have receptionists who speak English. But then I thought to go look up Iran’s time zone so that we could see if there would actually be any times at which we would both be awake. I knew that most of the Arab countries around the Gulf were GMT +3:00 and I wondered if Iran might be across the line and in the territory of GMT +4:00, but I  learned to my surprise that Iran is GMT + 3:30. I had always though that the whole point of time zones was that the minutes stayed the same while the hours changed, making time zone mathematics simple. Well, not in Iran.

Last week, after weeks and weeks of worry and contingency planning, our visas were approved. I overnighted my passport to Washington, and when it came back, I set to work reading it. The visa was in Farsi, and most important bits were translated into English. I don’t speak a word of Farsi, but knowing Arabic, I took a crack at the numbers. (Persians adopted the Arabic script after Islam arrived in Persia—the letters were slightly adapted to fit Persian phonology, but the numbers are the same.)  I carefully read the numbers to discover that according to the Farsi numbers, we were in the year 1389. Aha! I thought. Iran really is an Islamic Republic, and they use the Islamic calendar in official business, despite its drawbacks. (In the Islamic calendar, it being a true lunar calendar, dates move around in relation to the seasons, and the beginnings of months are based on local observations of the moon rather than any pre-determined schedule). Wrong! I soon recalled from a discussion in Jordan earlier in the sumer that we are already in the fifteenth Islamic century. A web search revealed the answer: Iran has their own calendar, and has had for the last 1389 years. It resembles our Gregorian calendar in being related to the solar year and having twelve months, but unlike the Gregorian calendar, it is extremely accurate. The web site I found explained that due to an extremely complex system of determining leap years, the Persian calendar is so accurate that by the time the calendar gains a day’s worth of error (3.8 million years hence), we would have to recalibrate anyway due to tidal braking. Brilliant, but completely different from anywhere else in the world (except for portions of Afghanistan).

And then there’s that simple matter of not having diplomatic contact with the United States, which is what keeps my mother up at night.

Categories: Iran, 2007
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