Blogs from Middle East - page 1058

At the hotel I book a tour to some of the region’s famous sights - the Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers, the Roman ruins of Apamea - having listened to the serenade of Hama’s creaking norias and utterly gotten the point. There’ve been cloudy skies all week, periodically opening and dumping a prodigious downpour while everyone goes scurrying for the nearest awning. The women hitch up their chadors and the men hitch up their gelabbiyah and everyone’s got a wary eye on their hemlines while they wait for the rain to let up. The sky’s an inauspicious gray when I peek out the window from under the covers, a few pigeons circling over the rooftops. There’s a slight break in the clouds as our minibus pulls out a half-hour later, the sky punctured by ... read more

Before my trip, my dad asked me about my next travel destination. I panicked of course, and said a half-truth..."Persia. Yep, sure it's a country". After all, a few years back my parents flipped out when I said I was in Turkey, screaming "WHAT? You're going to be abducted by a carpet-seller who will rename you Fatima and make you his fourth wife!". They knew little about Hanofi Turkey, where it's so lax and westernized without headscarves due to Ataturk's reforms at the turn of the century. So I couldnt mutter the word, 'Iran' obviously. "Where's the capital?" he asked. Uh-oh. I pronouned 'Tehran' in the weirdest possible way that made me sound like Chewbacca with a lisp. He did find out later on, but to my surprise didn't get hysterical. Instead, he recounted his ... read more

My first impression of Istanbul was as we were landing. The city is enourmous, incomprehensibly big. All the bulildings looked the same from the air, just rows and rows and rows of red roofs with tiny narrow streets in between. There was a thick layer of brown smog covering the city unlike anything I have ever seen before. The trip was uneventful, just an hour by train to Basel airport then a 3 hour flight. My first mission when arriving was to find the place where I was staying. I had 3 pages of directions and 2 maps but finding it was not the difficult part. After catching two buses I was dropped of about a 20 minute walk from the house. On the way I passed a fairly empty looking stadium surrounded with hundreds ... read more

So a reader sent me a short youtube link to a redonculous parody travel ad to the Middle East: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_hH1cPRXI0 Sure, it's black humor to it's deepest darkest black hole, but 'oh dear' enough to check out. Thanks for the worries, but Iran's really not all that dangerous once you're there as long as you don't confuse the country's name with its western neighbour's! (it has happened, no joke, at a UN Ambassador's university seminar. The guestspeaker who congresswoman made the mistake was not on 'wanna grab drinks after this gig?' terms with the Iranian UN Ambassador at least. Much of the American media, including the popular Glenn Beck, has said a lot of harmful comments about Iran. I'm a frat-party-ridden college kid so I cannot say that I am a specialist about the country...but ... read more

'Chador', in Farsi literally means 'tent'. It's the huge plain moon-shaped sheet that Iranian women donn themselves with, miraculously keeping it in place without the aid of any buttons or duct tape. Now, if it weren't for all the practice I got during dorm keg 'n' Toga parties and Greek/Roman plays (I knew Shakespeare and Sophocles would come in handy, everything truly does happen for a reason!) I couldn't have managed to drag myself around the Masshad's Holy Imam Reza complex feeling like I was going through one of those Asian 'sweat out the fat' diets for three hours. Rules for female visitors are bloody stricter than anywhere else I visited in Iran, for the reason that it is the third Holiest site for Shi'ites after Mecca and Medina. So for non-Muslims, this is the ... read more