According to a 16th century bon mot, Isfahan is half the world (it sounds better in Farsi: Esfahan nesf-e jahan). Today I covered about half the major tourist sights and am feeling just a little over-awed. But let's go back to where we left off.
I spent yesterday morning in Tehran (one of the weird things about travel is how it stretches out time--yesterday morning feels like forever ago) where my main mission was to get sorted telephonically. I realized I'd stupidly forgot to unlock my new (as of October) British mobile phone, which means I can't use a non-Virgin SIM card in it (retrospectively explaining why I couldn't use my ordinary German SIM card over New Year's in Berlin), which means my mobile phone is useless in Iran. Fortunately, buying a new phone wasn't too pricey, and so I was off to Isfahan by early afternoon with a new bit of high tech in tow.
The trip to Isfahan involved two acts of kindness from strangers. The first was at the bus terminal, where one of the bus company officials quickly realized that I would never succeed in the Darwinian struggle to get to the front of the ticket queue, and so pulled me back behind the counter, fast-tracked my bus ticket, and personally escorted me to my bus. On the way to Isfahan, I had difficulty actually using my phone because it was locked and the instructions on how to unlock it were in Farsi (no, still not fully literate in Farsi). I used a kind neighbour on the bus to unlock it a couple times to coordinate with my host in Isfahan, and when we got off the bus he saw me struggling again and dropped his bags and sorted out for me how to change the phone's language to English.
With that sorted I made my way to my first ever couchsurfing experience. For those of you who don't know it, couchsurfing.org is a global phenomenon that's rapidly replacing hostels as the go-to place for budget travellers. It really represents the Internet as its best: it helps people connect in person rather than just online, and fosters the virtues of hospitality and openness. The idea is that people volunteer to offer their couches to passers-through and take advantage of the same hospitality when they themselves are on the road. I'm a bit of a cheat, having only just signed up to travel Iran, but I fully intend to do what I can to make couches available to others in the future.
My host this time around is Mohsen (again, I'm not using the real names of any of my Iranian friends), although he was actually visiting family in Tehran the evening I arrived, so arranged for his pal Hassan to let me into his apartment, where a massive huggable bear of a Mexican called Roberto was already using a spare mattress.
Iranians are world champions at hospitality, so no surprise they've taken to couchsurfing like pros. Although here it seems the couchsurfing thing is as much--if not more--about meeting up with other locals. With facebook blocked (although, as I'm discovering on Mohsen's computer right now, "blocked" is always only a relative term to the digerati), couchsurfing is a valuable outlet for social networking, and Isfahan has a very lively network of couchsurfers who seem to hang out with one another all the time, with whatever foreigners they might have in tow. It seems to be a way for young, educated Iranians to connect outside the scrutiny the government has over non-virtual public spaces. As Hassan said to me, "Couchsurfing has changed my life."
As soon as my bags were dropped, I was swept off into town by Hassan and his school friend Farhad, with whom he'd only recently reconnected. Farhad now lives in Nashville working as an auto mechanic and is back in Isfahan for a few weeks for the New Year festivities that start next Thursday. Where Hassan, Mohsen, and most of the others I've met are middle class and university educated, Farhad was barred from university on account of being Baha'i (the only religion in Iran to be officially condemned--yes, even the Jews are provided constitutional protections and one guaranteed seat in parliament), and speaks the street slang of a tough guy who's had to find his own way in a foreign country.
Among my other companions that evening was Sareh, who put the lie to my claim in the previous post that I wouldn't see a full head of woman's hair for a month. Behind closed doors, she has no problem at all dropping the hejab, and is pretty lax about it out of doors too: like many young, liberal Iranian women, she often gets by with her hejab casually hanging off her puffy pony tail at the back. She studied business in Bangalore for four years, where the main language of exchange was English, and as a result she speaks near-fluent English with an Indian accent, which is comically incongruous.
The evening involved cruising through town, checking out Naqsh-e Jahan Square at night, and getting ice cream and sweets (Iranians, to a one so far, seem to have a mouth full of sweet teeth--take note aspiring dentists looking for a growing market). All harmless fun, although I've also been assured we can get alcohol if I want it (as Mohsen put it, boastfully but not at all unseriously, "we can get anything you want"). I thought explaining that I've given up alcohol for Lent despite being non-Christian would be a bit too much, so I just said thanks but no thanks.
And today was the grand tour. Mohsen arrived at 6:30 this morning from a night bus from Tehran and collapsed for a while as Roberto and I headed out with Sareh mid-morning to Nashq-e Jahan Square. The square is second only to Tiananmen Square as the world's largest, and is a damn sight more beautiful. The square--and Isfahan's status as Iran's top tourist draw in general--is owed largely to Shah Abbas the Great, who brought Iran's Safavid Dynasty to its apogee in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. And while the square itself is magnificent to behold (google image search it), even more spectacular are the buildings that surround it. We began with Chehel Sotun ("forty pillar") Palace, whose twenty graceful wooden pillars at the porch entrance are reflected in the pool leading up to it (twenty pillars plus twenty reflected pillars equalling forty).
Both the entrance porch and the main hall of the palace itself gave me a feeling of being literally overwhelmed that followed me on all my visits that morning. There was a horrible feeling of inadequacy to my presence there. I clicked away with my camera, but photos can never do it justice (especially in the unfortunately yucky overcast-yet-bright light). And it was all simply too much. I kept feeling I was moving on too quickly, but also knew that there was nothing I could do to properly absorb what I was looking at. Part of it, I think, is that I share the affliction of most people in this day and age that my mind is permanently locked into too high a rev to slow down sufficiently to properly take in anything (an affliction that regular meditation practice has made me more aware of while doing little to allay). But it was also just too much: floor-to-high-high-ceiling ornate patterns, lovingly curlicued, representing decades of effort from hundreds of highly skilled craftsmen--how can my limited soul take in so much beauty in a gulp? And a gulp was all I got. I suppose I could have just lain down on the floor and gazed at it all day but at the end of that day I'd still feel inadequate to the task of appreciating it. I suppose this is why people study architecture: it takes not just an appreciative eye, but a specialized eye, to even begin to know what to do with all this.
From there we moved on to the Ali Qapu Palace, an usually tall affair at six storeys, the highlight of which for me was the top floor music room, which again is indescribable and overwhelming. Here, the ceilings were stuccoed with gentle patterns, as well as cut with gracefully shaped holes (many, I think, in the shapes of instruments), which apparently enhanced the acoustics. I didn't bring any musical instruments to play, but it looks great, however it sounds.
And then there was the Masjed-e Shah, the massive mosque at the far end of the square. Isfahan is known for its blue and turquoise tile work, and this mosque is its finest representation (that I've seen so far, at least). I'm sorry--words are failing me. It was big. It was astonishing. There was a lot of blue and a lot of patterns. I've taken loads of photos just trying to take in the richness of the geometrical patterns in the tiles. And those tiles go way, way, way up. Good on the Safavids.
After taking in the jewels of Nashq-e Jahan Square, I had a late lunch with Roberto, Mohsen, Sareh, and Sareh's brother at a lovely traditional restaurant just off the square. They were a bit concerned at first when I said I was a vegetarian (in England when I say I'm a vegetarian people often say, "but do you eat fish?" with the weird implication that fish aren't animals, whereas the response here was, "but do you at least eat chicken?"), but this turned out to work in my favour, as that noblest of vegetables, eggplant/aubergine (I no longer know which form of English I speak), came to the rescue. The best meal I've had in Iran so far (although in fairness, the competition hasn't exactly been stiff--my fault).
After a brief stroll in the bazaar, we trekked out to New Jolfa later in the afternoon to visit the Vank Cathedral, which is the heart of Armenian Christianity in Iran. "Old" Jolfa is in northwestern Iran on the Armenian border, but Shah Abbas imported large numbers of Armenian merchants and artists to build his capital, and they've remained in Isfahan to this day. Compared to the splendours of Nashq-e Jahan Square, Vank Cathedral is fairly modest, although it would be a must-see gem by any normal standards. The church itself looks more like a mosque on the outside, although the inside dazzlingly betrays the Muslim interdiction on depicting the human form with massive frescoes of the miracles of saints and the very nasty afterlife in store for sinners (apparently a lot of fire and sharp-toothed demons gnawing at the genitals). I was chatted up there by an Azeri visitor from northwestern Iran who (among other things) remarked to me how astonishing he found it that there were human figures everywhere. It had never occurred to me before, but of course someone who's only ever been inside mosques must be quite bowled over by Christians' enthusiasm for depicting people.
And now I'm back in Mohsen's apartment, trying to remember everything I wanted to write even though I've only been in Isfahan a bit more than 24 hours. The apartment, by the way, is very spacious and tastefully decorated even though Mohsen is only 21 and lives here alone. He's a student doing a degree in computer science, but is also a keen photographer and graphic designer and his photos (making ingenious use of Photoshop) have won a number of prizes and he's already been running his own graphic design company for two years and has been offered scholarships to two different American universities next year. But the swank apartment, I think, owes a lot more to well-off parents than to any success he's already achieved on his own.
I remarked earlier on Sareh's rather casual attitude with regard to hejab. More generally, I should remark that the women I've seen in Iran (well, maybe half the women--the more conservatively dressed do exist as well) are very far from taking the legal requirement to cover their hair and not show off their figures as an injunction against looking as good as they possibly can. Bright lipstick, heavy eye make-up, and blinged-up clothing and jewellery are everywhere on the streets of Tehran and Isfahan. More intriguingly, Tehran seems to be one of the global hot spots for plastic surgery. In 24 hours in Tehran I think I counted four women and two men with the tell-tale nose bandage of rhinoplasty, and have seen a few more in Isfahan. From what I gather, the bandage, far from being something to hide, is a status symbol, since only the fairly wealthy can afford a nose job.
I spent yesterday morning in Tehran (one of the weird things about travel is how it stretches out time--yesterday morning feels like forever ago) where my main mission was to get sorted telephonically. I realized I'd stupidly forgot to unlock my new (as of October) British mobile phone, which means I can't use a non-Virgin SIM card in it (retrospectively explaining why I couldn't use my ordinary German SIM card over New Year's in Berlin), which means my mobile phone is useless in Iran. Fortunately, buying a new phone wasn't too pricey, and so I was off to Isfahan by early afternoon with a new bit of high tech in tow.
The trip to Isfahan involved two acts of kindness from strangers. The first was at the bus terminal, where one of the bus company officials quickly realized that I would never succeed in the Darwinian struggle to get to the front of the ticket queue, and so pulled me back behind the counter, fast-tracked my bus ticket, and personally escorted me to my bus. On the way to Isfahan, I had difficulty actually using my phone because it was locked and the instructions on how to unlock it were in Farsi (no, still not fully literate in Farsi). I used a kind neighbour on the bus to unlock it a couple times to coordinate with my host in Isfahan, and when we got off the bus he saw me struggling again and dropped his bags and sorted out for me how to change the phone's language to English.
With that sorted I made my way to my first ever couchsurfing experience. For those of you who don't know it, couchsurfing.org is a global phenomenon that's rapidly replacing hostels as the go-to place for budget travellers. It really represents the Internet as its best: it helps people connect in person rather than just online, and fosters the virtues of hospitality and openness. The idea is that people volunteer to offer their couches to passers-through and take advantage of the same hospitality when they themselves are on the road. I'm a bit of a cheat, having only just signed up to travel Iran, but I fully intend to do what I can to make couches available to others in the future.
My host this time around is Mohsen (again, I'm not using the real names of any of my Iranian friends), although he was actually visiting family in Tehran the evening I arrived, so arranged for his pal Hassan to let me into his apartment, where a massive huggable bear of a Mexican called Roberto was already using a spare mattress.
Iranians are world champions at hospitality, so no surprise they've taken to couchsurfing like pros. Although here it seems the couchsurfing thing is as much--if not more--about meeting up with other locals. With facebook blocked (although, as I'm discovering on Mohsen's computer right now, "blocked" is always only a relative term to the digerati), couchsurfing is a valuable outlet for social networking, and Isfahan has a very lively network of couchsurfers who seem to hang out with one another all the time, with whatever foreigners they might have in tow. It seems to be a way for young, educated Iranians to connect outside the scrutiny the government has over non-virtual public spaces. As Hassan said to me, "Couchsurfing has changed my life."
As soon as my bags were dropped, I was swept off into town by Hassan and his school friend Farhad, with whom he'd only recently reconnected. Farhad now lives in Nashville working as an auto mechanic and is back in Isfahan for a few weeks for the New Year festivities that start next Thursday. Where Hassan, Mohsen, and most of the others I've met are middle class and university educated, Farhad was barred from university on account of being Baha'i (the only religion in Iran to be officially condemned--yes, even the Jews are provided constitutional protections and one guaranteed seat in parliament), and speaks the street slang of a tough guy who's had to find his own way in a foreign country.
Among my other companions that evening was Sareh, who put the lie to my claim in the previous post that I wouldn't see a full head of woman's hair for a month. Behind closed doors, she has no problem at all dropping the hejab, and is pretty lax about it out of doors too: like many young, liberal Iranian women, she often gets by with her hejab casually hanging off her puffy pony tail at the back. She studied business in Bangalore for four years, where the main language of exchange was English, and as a result she speaks near-fluent English with an Indian accent, which is comically incongruous.
The evening involved cruising through town, checking out Naqsh-e Jahan Square at night, and getting ice cream and sweets (Iranians, to a one so far, seem to have a mouth full of sweet teeth--take note aspiring dentists looking for a growing market). All harmless fun, although I've also been assured we can get alcohol if I want it (as Mohsen put it, boastfully but not at all unseriously, "we can get anything you want"). I thought explaining that I've given up alcohol for Lent despite being non-Christian would be a bit too much, so I just said thanks but no thanks.
And today was the grand tour. Mohsen arrived at 6:30 this morning from a night bus from Tehran and collapsed for a while as Roberto and I headed out with Sareh mid-morning to Nashq-e Jahan Square. The square is second only to Tiananmen Square as the world's largest, and is a damn sight more beautiful. The square--and Isfahan's status as Iran's top tourist draw in general--is owed largely to Shah Abbas the Great, who brought Iran's Safavid Dynasty to its apogee in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. And while the square itself is magnificent to behold (google image search it), even more spectacular are the buildings that surround it. We began with Chehel Sotun ("forty pillar") Palace, whose twenty graceful wooden pillars at the porch entrance are reflected in the pool leading up to it (twenty pillars plus twenty reflected pillars equalling forty).
Both the entrance porch and the main hall of the palace itself gave me a feeling of being literally overwhelmed that followed me on all my visits that morning. There was a horrible feeling of inadequacy to my presence there. I clicked away with my camera, but photos can never do it justice (especially in the unfortunately yucky overcast-yet-bright light). And it was all simply too much. I kept feeling I was moving on too quickly, but also knew that there was nothing I could do to properly absorb what I was looking at. Part of it, I think, is that I share the affliction of most people in this day and age that my mind is permanently locked into too high a rev to slow down sufficiently to properly take in anything (an affliction that regular meditation practice has made me more aware of while doing little to allay). But it was also just too much: floor-to-high-high-ceiling ornate patterns, lovingly curlicued, representing decades of effort from hundreds of highly skilled craftsmen--how can my limited soul take in so much beauty in a gulp? And a gulp was all I got. I suppose I could have just lain down on the floor and gazed at it all day but at the end of that day I'd still feel inadequate to the task of appreciating it. I suppose this is why people study architecture: it takes not just an appreciative eye, but a specialized eye, to even begin to know what to do with all this.
From there we moved on to the Ali Qapu Palace, an usually tall affair at six storeys, the highlight of which for me was the top floor music room, which again is indescribable and overwhelming. Here, the ceilings were stuccoed with gentle patterns, as well as cut with gracefully shaped holes (many, I think, in the shapes of instruments), which apparently enhanced the acoustics. I didn't bring any musical instruments to play, but it looks great, however it sounds.
And then there was the Masjed-e Shah, the massive mosque at the far end of the square. Isfahan is known for its blue and turquoise tile work, and this mosque is its finest representation (that I've seen so far, at least). I'm sorry--words are failing me. It was big. It was astonishing. There was a lot of blue and a lot of patterns. I've taken loads of photos just trying to take in the richness of the geometrical patterns in the tiles. And those tiles go way, way, way up. Good on the Safavids.
After taking in the jewels of Nashq-e Jahan Square, I had a late lunch with Roberto, Mohsen, Sareh, and Sareh's brother at a lovely traditional restaurant just off the square. They were a bit concerned at first when I said I was a vegetarian (in England when I say I'm a vegetarian people often say, "but do you eat fish?" with the weird implication that fish aren't animals, whereas the response here was, "but do you at least eat chicken?"), but this turned out to work in my favour, as that noblest of vegetables, eggplant/aubergine (I no longer know which form of English I speak), came to the rescue. The best meal I've had in Iran so far (although in fairness, the competition hasn't exactly been stiff--my fault).
After a brief stroll in the bazaar, we trekked out to New Jolfa later in the afternoon to visit the Vank Cathedral, which is the heart of Armenian Christianity in Iran. "Old" Jolfa is in northwestern Iran on the Armenian border, but Shah Abbas imported large numbers of Armenian merchants and artists to build his capital, and they've remained in Isfahan to this day. Compared to the splendours of Nashq-e Jahan Square, Vank Cathedral is fairly modest, although it would be a must-see gem by any normal standards. The church itself looks more like a mosque on the outside, although the inside dazzlingly betrays the Muslim interdiction on depicting the human form with massive frescoes of the miracles of saints and the very nasty afterlife in store for sinners (apparently a lot of fire and sharp-toothed demons gnawing at the genitals). I was chatted up there by an Azeri visitor from northwestern Iran who (among other things) remarked to me how astonishing he found it that there were human figures everywhere. It had never occurred to me before, but of course someone who's only ever been inside mosques must be quite bowled over by Christians' enthusiasm for depicting people.
And now I'm back in Mohsen's apartment, trying to remember everything I wanted to write even though I've only been in Isfahan a bit more than 24 hours. The apartment, by the way, is very spacious and tastefully decorated even though Mohsen is only 21 and lives here alone. He's a student doing a degree in computer science, but is also a keen photographer and graphic designer and his photos (making ingenious use of Photoshop) have won a number of prizes and he's already been running his own graphic design company for two years and has been offered scholarships to two different American universities next year. But the swank apartment, I think, owes a lot more to well-off parents than to any success he's already achieved on his own.
I remarked earlier on Sareh's rather casual attitude with regard to hejab. More generally, I should remark that the women I've seen in Iran (well, maybe half the women--the more conservatively dressed do exist as well) are very far from taking the legal requirement to cover their hair and not show off their figures as an injunction against looking as good as they possibly can. Bright lipstick, heavy eye make-up, and blinged-up clothing and jewellery are everywhere on the streets of Tehran and Isfahan. More intriguingly, Tehran seems to be one of the global hot spots for plastic surgery. In 24 hours in Tehran I think I counted four women and two men with the tell-tale nose bandage of rhinoplasty, and have seen a few more in Isfahan. From what I gather, the bandage, far from being something to hide, is a status symbol, since only the fairly wealthy can afford a nose job.
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