more on Bushehr

First a little hearsay: An obviously foreign friend from language class was walking down the street about a week ago when a woman approached him and asked in bad Persian (he characterized it as bad, and his own Persian is nothing to write home about) if he was a foreigner, and then if she could walk with him. He said sure and in a combination of Persian, Arabic, and English she told him that she'd just fled from Baghdad a couple weeks before and he shouldn't believe the Western media--security is bad and getting worse again there.

Bushehr was boring. It's so damn hot and humid that we (my friend Amir and were staying at the house of the twin brother of a former classmate of Amir's, and his teenager cousin from across the street was a near-permanent presence so we were mostly a group of 4) only left the house before sunset to drive to the house of a relative for lunch, and then to sit around on the floor of their guest rooms, chat and nap and watch TV. Our host had a thick Luri accent and spoke very local slang that resembled Kurdish a bit in grammatical structure and suffixes (eg instead of Che kar mikoni? Cha kariya? instead of Tashakor mikonam, Tashakori konm), and when most of his relatives spoke I couldn't tell if they were speaking Persian or Luri or understand more than a word here and there. Women, if present at the relatives' houses, were invisible. I went 3 days without speaking to a female.

Most of the relatives watched BBC Persian and VOA from contraband satellite dishes, and after a week of watching IRNA and Press TV it seemed rather ridiculous to hear talking heads comparing the status of Iranian political prisoners to Auschwitz on VOA. I watched reports from both sides two sides on the operation against the MEK at Camp Ashraf in Iraq--the Press TV piece was about how the MEK members had been waiting for the police with stones and tear gas and 40+ officers had been injured; the BBC piece showed footage of police brutalizing people and brandishing chains and truncheons as they entered the camp.

Other than watching TV pretty much all we did was play soccer on XBox. It's incredibly annoying how Iranians even do tarof when playing video games, surrendering the ball on purpose etc because you're the guest unless you insist. I could feel my muscles atrophying and my back got very sore from spending 20 hours a day sitting/lying on the floor.

We went swimming one night at about 22:00. I asked them if they were sure there were no sharks--which tend to be nocturnal, I stressed--but they laughed no, they always went swimming late at night when the temperature was reasonable and it wasn't crowded. So we bought skimpy cotton swim trunks (I insisted on the most modest available), which we changed into the swimsuits--on top of our underwear; getting naked in front of each other just doesn't seem to be something men do in the Middle East, even in the locker rooms of muscleman gyms where they're all about dropping their pants to show off their gluts on demand etc--by the roadside

I did short interviews with my host (who was such a lazy bastard it took 2 days to coax him into detaching himself from his XBox 360 to answer my questions) and a relative of his. The most interesting thing they both said was that in Bushehr, where there have been no real protests since the first week after the election, the problem is that everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows who goes out into the streets. The morning after the election, according to the host's relative, members of the Sepah called all their friends and relatives and told them Look, if you go out into the streets we're going to have to do our job and it will end violently. And indeed protests were quickly crushed and, though according to them people still gather in small groups around bazaar to mutter angrily, there's been little political activity recently in Bushehr or neighboring Band-e Genoveh.

My host, and electronics merchant of some kind, hadn't even been planning on voting, having not voted in 2005 and being thorougly disillusioned, but then on election day he had seen the long lines and outpouring of support for Mousavi and decided to vote, driving from polling station to polling station in the evening until he found a mosque where the line was short and he didn't have to step out of his air-conditioned (Iranian-made) Peugeot. He didn't join the protests but said he sat in front of his TV for three days straight after the election (big surprise) and kept trying to contact his friends in Tehran for updates. When I asked him why he wasn't himself going to meetings or out in the streets, he said again that there it wasn't like Tehran where everyone was a stranger, here if you were politically active you became known (ie by security forces) very fast.

I've started asking people for election- and post-election-themed jokes, which I think I want to include a part about in my thesis, but so far haven't heard any good ones. My host was too lazy to be bothered to look up the many he had saved in his cell phone, though he did comment that in Bushehr, when they had cut off text-message service (which everyone calls SMS here) for weeks after the election (it's back as of last week) it hadn't mattered so much as organizing protests etc, but had crushed people's spirits because in Iran's political climate an important form of quiet protest/resistance is exactly these political jokes, which are mostly transmitted friend-to-friend through SMS. Now that SMS service had returned, he said, people were sending jokes again in a kind of solidarity and hope was again on the rise.

The air was so dusty (though there was no palpable wind, at least inside the city) that not just flight but also bus schedules were cancelled, and I was stuck in town for an extra day before going back along--a 17 hour ride plus and hour or so on the metro and then straight to Persian class. I think the one thing that annoys me most about Iranians is their inability to understand that when boarding a crowded subway train, things go faster if one first steps aside to allow passengers to get off the train before stepping aboard oneself. Here people just shove their way past each other and maybe 20% of the time a shouting/pushing fight breaks out.

Here's an interesting one (for those theorizing the end of theocracy/velvet coup by the Revolutionary Guards) that I heard back in Vienna, which was told by Ahmedinejad supporters about reformist candidate and cleric Mehdi Karroubi before the elections:

Karroubi is on his campaign tour bus and wants to show off what a man of the people he is, so he goes up front to chat with the bus driver. Karroubi asks him how his work is going and the man complains that he works 18 hours a day and he has a pregnant wife back home that he never gets to see. To sympathize Karroubi says, "Oh you poor man, never able to see your wife, how do you even know the child is your?" Are you sure your wife hasn't been cheating? The bus driver eyes Karroubi and says "Tell you what, if my kid doesn't look like me, I'll send him to school in Qom."

I think that's funnier in Persian, or maybe the PhD student (working as a research assistant for the American Enterprise Institute, btw) I heard it from just did a better job telling it.