2023-06-26

After working with Zheng Zheng, my body clock completely shifted westward.

By this calculation, I’m right in the Iran Standard Time zone of UTC+3:30.

So, I’ll post some photos of Iran~

Photo 1: Brought gifts from the ancient East to the kids at a kindergarten in Tehran. The children in Iran are incredibly cute — I really wanted to sneak one home to raise!

Photo 2: Visited a Kazakh friend’s place for hookah. He absolutely loves China and dreams of learning Chinese one day so he can come live there.

Photo 3: Took a stroll with an Iranian friend on some high ground in Qazvin. Although Iran is a Muslim country, it’s quite secularized. This friend’s daily mantra was “f**k the religion!”

Photo 4: In the Grand Bazaar of Isfahan, a freshly cleaned pool. A little girl walked past, and I slipped into a trance where the mind triumphed over matter, as if time froze at that moment.

Iran is a truly fascinating place.

The citizens’ lives are supported by very generous welfare: almost free education means many people hold doctorates; all restaurants give away bread (naan) for free, and you often see people carrying huge stacks of naan from bakeries on the street; gasoline is extremely cheap, so almost everyone owns a car—though some cars cost as little as 2000 RMB and are pretty unsafe, and on a four-lane road you’ll often see six or seven cars driving abreast, nobody follows traffic rules—shocking, really. The RMB goes a long way there, but the food basically consists of various types of kabab and naan, and the rice has a really strange shape.

From what I observed, not many people in Iran are genuinely religious.

Ultimately, Persian culture is somewhat distinct from Islamic culture, which creates a subtle inner conflict in people’s minds. As an ancient civilization, Iranians have a strong sense of cultural pride and a big-country mentality—as a Chinese, I can easily relate to that.

Spices are everywhere in Iran, and the indoor cleanliness of various buildings is unexpectedly excellent.

Saffron is a specialty of Iran; supposedly each person can only take 200g out of customs. Any more than that is smuggling. How do I know? When I was flying back, the person behind me at security got randomly checked—they found 300g and it was confiscated, I think. And I, who had already passed security, was trembling as I thought about the 300g of saffron in my suitcase…

• 🧩 A Fragment of Life