Taxi Talk

ET, View from Iran:

Got into a car that smelled like cat pee… I imagined that the windows were left open one night and Tehran’s cats made use of the car.

We passed a fancy hair salon for men with wall length headshots of long haired men. “I’ve never lived anywhere else where men were as fussy about their hair,” I commented.

“Hey,” said K, “it’s all we’ve got.”

“If you go to South Tehran with that kind of hair, you get arrested,” our driver told us. “Too much gel and they get you. We have no freedom.”

That got him started…

“I don’t understand why we are making all this fuss about nuclear energy. We have bombs with anti-Israel slogans painted on them and we want to know why Israel is afraid of us having nuclear capabilities. I cannot understand why our two countries are not friendly in the first place. We were friends. We Iranians have nothing against Israel. Why do we have to pretend that we do?”

I am thinking that my Persian is failing me. I just sit and let the driver do all of the talking. When we get out of the car, I ask K if I understood him correctly. “You did,” he tells me. “A lot of Iranians feel the way he does.”

The day before an accountant told me that Israelis were crazy. “Don’t you agree?”

“Well, given the fact that so many of them were born in Iran, I would say that if they are crazy you are crazy.”

“You got me,” he admitted.

Iranians are so baffled by the world’s response to AN’s anti-semetic comments. I have said this over and over: they have no idea of the true history of World War II. They never heard of the holocaust. They cannot understand the emotional/historical impact of AN’s rhetoric. Frankly, most Iranians cannot understand why the rest of the world pays attention to AN when they themselves do not.

P.S. Thanks to Troy Z. for this link . Great insight...