Banana

Soufi told me that Chinese from China call singaporean chinese Banana. Because talking about their race they are yellow, but inside, they are white and westernized.

Holi

Today I attended Holi or the festival of colors with Rashmi and Chetan and their friends.

In India, Holi takes place in the streets and lasts at least for one week. But here is Singapore, and they love to regulate everything, so it happens in a closed area for one day and you can only use standardized colors they sell inside. You have to pay to enter and the entrance fee includes one drink. Fortunately, they don't give you goodie bags and there is no lucky draw. There is a stage for live music (partly) and the show coordinator (or the singer or ... ) shouts every 5 minutes: "Are you having fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun?". They need feedback for that, because they can't see Indians just enjoying their time in every possible way and don't need them to entertain them at all.

Hint: If Rashmi tells you next year that "Don't worry. People don't know you that much, so they will be nice to you and won't put much color on you and ...", don't trust her. You are the first person that people start putting color on you, then they pour enough water on your head to make sure that the colors go down your collar completely. Well, they tell you happy Holi first and after they are done they'll smile at you.

.....

At the end they wash their faces and the color almost goes away.You wash your face again and again and again, but your face remains red and they continue laughing at you and enjoying their time.

Then they decide to take the MRT back home, as no cab driver might accept to give you a ride with all the colors dripping from your clothes. Everybody looks at you like an alien in the MRT station. Your Indian friends start a very normal political discussion with you, because they want to remember your face like that for a while (You know, it's just fun to remember later). Of course they give you a compliment about how nicely purple goes with you skin color. Rashmi enjoys it the most when some blue powder scatters everywhere each time you move your head, because you've forgotten to clean your hair before leaving the venue.

Back home, I think how many nations are like Indians? Dancing and singing and celebrating is in their blood.

It was just fun today. Apart from one of my ears that is slightly blue and the other one that is a bit purple the rest of the colors finally went a way.

Holi is to celebrate the beginning of spring. In it's original form people used to use natural colors made of flowers and overall it had been a romantic festival. These days those colors are replaced with synthetic colors and some people even might throw other things (like eggs, obviously) at you in the streets.

Note: Throwing shoes particularly happens in Iraq by journalists and has nothing to do with Holi.

In India if you go out during Holi festival when you come back home you look black, because every one adds something to the color collection on your face and clothes.

HAPPY HOLI!!!

You can find me in this photo that I stole from Chetan's pictures:

Crab

Yesterday I asked a decent chinese lady who was squeezing the poor crabs in the Fairprice that how she is gonna cook the crabs. She replied very normally as she is talking about a bunch of lettuce, "Well, you know these are alive so you shouldn't open the straps around the legs, because they will start walking. You should put them alive in the steamer"!!!! Mama! Where am I living? :`(

Fortune

If in Singapore a car accident happens there will be a traffic jam just like everywhere else in the world, not just because of the blockage or rubbernecking, but because some people believe that if someone suffers from bad luck their luck is transfered to others. So they just stop to note down the car's plates number, then they use the number for different purposes. Even if someone dies badly (I don't mean severely I mean in a bad way ) they use his/her birthdate or ID number or ....

Shanghai

If you want to visit Shanghai for less than 24 hours you don't need a visa. You can take a fast train (it is really fast, 431 km/h woohooo!) from the airport to the city, and come back on time for your flight. After visiting Shanghai I appreciate it a lot that everybody speaks English in Singapore. I spent two hours in the airport to only exchange money and find out where I can visit in the city, and I finally ended up in a shopping mall!!! Believe me, that's the last thing you might want to do after living in Singapore for a while. In the city I found a tourist and he told me about Oriental Pearl Tower which was much better than hanging around a shopping mall. On my way back, all the ticket vending machines in the subway station only accepted coins and the passenger service was shut!





You can see me in this photo contemplating at the height of 350 m (it really makes a difference ;) ):

The sun

Los Angeles is 15 hours behind Shanghai (and Singapore). So I caught the same sun I saw in Shanghai the next morning in LA. You know, in south east asia we travel exactly opposite the direction that the sun travels to reach to the US.

Shanghai:




Somewhere in between:




Los Angeles:

Dream

I had a surreal dream last night (I'm not sure what surreal means but it sounds very intellectualist so ... ). I was on a roof top with a group of people (as always, I didn't know them). Suddenly tens of bombers emerged in the sky and the air attack alarm went off. I could see the sparks of anti-aircraft bullets here and there. We lied on the floor and waited to hear the explosions. wait wait wait but nothing ... I stood up and the floor was covered with yellow pin-spinners. Someone whispered in my ear, "wear this cap and jacket, the government patrols are around".

Sacrifice

This is really a new era in Gods' life. Before, people used to sacrifice human for their deities. They put some cake and orange at the sidewalks these days!!! Well, may be not for their deities any more, but for spirit of their ancestors ;)

Catttttt

Today morning on my way to school I captured this: :D

Intelligence

In my opinion the best artificial intelligence algorithms work like this at their highest performance ( I couldn't find the cartoonist):

Dragon illusion

Roger brought this cute Dragon to the lab yesterday.





You can either cut it out from the image bellow and make one for yourself, and then by following the instructions on the right corner experience the illusion, or check the description here. This dragon is made by ThinkFun.

Islam/India

In India polygamy is legal for muslim men, and just because of this some hindus convert to Islam. According to Anjali, in Mumbai if a building in which mostly hindus live in is next to a building in which mostly muslim live in, the price of that property is lower compare to the same building not neighboring a muslim's building. Now. put these tow facts together and conclude anything you like.

Arab street and Shisha

This is some kind of a sticky liquid which is sold inside small tubes. You can buy a pack and blow up the liquid using the tiny straws that are inside the package. For sure this has a name and you've probably seen it somewhere else in the world, but I like the photo I took, so ...





This area in singapore is very popular because of Shisha or Hookah or as we call it in Iran Qalyan (قلیان). We decided to try it and I was supposed to be the most experienced one, because you can see a picture of one of our ancestors (she is not my ancestor for sure) who were able to smoke Qalyan around 250 years a go, but actually it finally didn't work.




Hint: If someone tells you that the smoke is filtered because it passes through water don't listen. Qalyan is much worse than cigarettes. There is no filter plus you need to inhale harder.

Desaru

Here is Desaru. A beach, or put it better a collection of beaches and resorts, in Malaysia only one hour and a half from Singapore. It's like going "Shomal" for vacations.


Note: Tehran is just few hours from the Caspian sea and we are so used to flee from Tehran to the beaches (they look very different from what people refer to as beach in other countries ;) ) and beautiful forests along the shore. Only few days off and the roads from Tehran to this coastal area and reverse are jammed. If you like driving (as I do) you can go every weekend if you want. And if someone goes to the Caspian sea for vacations they just say they went to "Shomaal" (شمال) which mean the north.

Desaru:





The yellow fruit was new to me, I can't remember the name though, or may be it was one type of passion fruit. The only thing I know is I ended up having a sore throat for four days after tasting one of these.

And here are some snaps from Shomal (northern Iran):

(I'll add some later")

Underwater Rugby

Cecilie told me yesterday that one of her favorite sports is underwater rugby. Finally I found a sport that I don't want to try:

Underwater Rugby match

Finally back in Singapore

I find it a bit awkward that everybody thinks your country is a desert, but you have to send your supervisor an email to inform him you are trapped in the Tehran airport because of the heavy snow that started just one hour before your flight. The weather halted all the flights for three days. I am adding some photos from Tehran and the airport. It should be pleasant in summer.

Synesthesia

Yesterday, the lecturer of Neurobiology course talked about Synesthesia in the class. I'm not sure if you can really call Synesthesia a disease or disorder, because it is a sensory system disorder but it somehow sounds cool. In the brain and human neural system there are some inhibitory pathways that prevent mixing up the data you receive from your individual senses (vision, hearing, ...), but for some people this mechanism is impaired so for example, they smell something but this sensory input in addition to olfactory bulb in the brain, which is responsible for processing odors, reaches to the auditory cortex as well, the region that processes inputs from ears. So these people smell a fragrance and this results in hearing a piece of music!!! You can watch a short documentary about this disorder, bellow. This patient when tastes something visualizes a particular color based on the taste, so he likes to eat chicken with ice cream because their taste results in a beautiful color combination:

Synesthesia

Interestingly, I asked Cecilie, my roommate, about this and she said yes she knows about it, and she is wondering if she has it! Because for her, time is like an ellipse that each month is located at a certain location on the ellipse, and she observes herself on the ellipse based on the date. I was about to say something but my other flat mate asked "nice! Do you see the ellipse around your body? Because the way I see it is around my body and January is in front of me and december is at the back".

At this point I decided to stop the conversation and start looking for new roommates.

‌Escalator

The other day a lady was teaching her kid how to use an escalator!!! I always though people know that from birth!!!

Tamil Tigers

I told one of my friends that I was talking to a friend of mine from Sri Lanka about Tamil tigers and she asked: "what's special about this species of tigers?" :O How is it possible that someone in her 20s didn't hear of Tamil tigers even once?

Candy (continued)

I told Hoi about the candy and this is the description she sent me back:


The candy that you shown me yesterday with that specific taste is called 'salmiak drop'. 'Salmiak' is the taste, and 'drop' is the black candy. Drop is typically Dutch/European and it comes in lots of flavors (sweet, bitter, salty) and structures (hard, soft). I like the soft honey variant :D By the way, 'salmiak' is used regularly in candy, I believe. I know some salmiak candy, pretty nice.

Candy

Few days back a Finnish guy showed up in our lab and wanted to meet Roger who is Norwegian. Roger wasn't around and he decided to offer me one of the candies he had brought for Roger, because he thought Roger will like them. He warned me that you may don't like it they don't taste sweet and this and that. I finally took one because they looked very exotic. You can see two photos of this beautiful candy. Take note that the pictures are not black and white, the candy was BLACK!!! It was gelatinous and smelled like Captain Black tobacco. The part that is missing is the part that I bit. It had the strangest taste you can imagine. When Roger came back it turned out that Scandinavians love this type of candy and they are just popular. He tried to explain what it is made of, but I didn't recognize any of the ingredients so we just gave up.

Sacrifice

Yesterday I overheard a professor in the science department talking to his phone saying "These animals must be sacrificed anyways"!!!! That's mean :(

Yassihood

Today I tried archery for the first time in my life:





And it reminded me of the story of Arash Kamangir (آرش کمانگیر). I always find the story moving and Siavash Kasrai's (سیاوش کسرایی) poem fascinating. (I'll add a short translation here later)


Statue of Arash in Sadabad Palace in Tehran:

Speed

In my opinion Singaporeans walk toooooooooooooo slowly, specialay when it comes into walking in the shopping malls or tight sidewalks. But based on a survey, conducted by BBC, Singaporeans were the fastest nation among the countries included in the survey!!!! Either BBC is wrong or people in other countries crawl.

I'm sure they did the survey in business area. Aldo believes that in business area even the escalators move faster.

Obviously middle east had the slowest pace :P , we are still living, or we don't need to do much to survive, oil does it for us.

Vegetarians

There is a full range of vegetarians, some of them even eat fish. But Arudhra told me that a group of vegetarians in India, strict vegetarians, even don't eat carrot or potatoes because these parts are the roots of the plant so when you take those out of the soil the plant dies.

I asked Anjali and she added that Jains, like her, are strict vegetarians. They even don't use cars, for example, because you might kill insects and other small creatures. Well, Anjali is a special Jain so she eats French Fries and has an iPod.

Singapore

The first impression that Singapore had on me was people love shopping. Even movie theaters are in multi-story shopping malls and you can see huge number of people going up and down the escalators to cover as many shops as they can. Strange thing is they all finally look like each other. It seems they buy exactly the same products from the shops. I can't feel if something like style or personal preference is defined for these people. They spend almost all their spare time to buy shorts and flip-flops, may be they have thousands pairs of those, who knows. Anyways, overall, Singapore to me looks like a space city in the movies, in the year 3000 or something, aside from two main differences. In those cities usually the greenery has destroyed, because of a nuclear war 100 years earlier, but Singapore is greeeeeeeeeeeeeen, and in those movies usually most of the people are American and one Chinese has the role of a scientist or something like that, but here more than 70% of the population are Chinese.

Two times higher

I told a chinese that something is two times higher than something else and it turned out that for a Chinese this, in fact, means that one thing is three times higher than the other one (based on their language), but twice as high works just perfectly, as you expect, so use that!

Obituary

Believe me or not this is an obituary I received in my university mail box, I omitted the names:

With unlimited sorrow we announce that Mr....., the head of .... family, father of Dr.... MIGRATES to the world of eternity.

I never had thought of it like that before :D. "MIGRATES". That's really cool.

Prehistoric Saudi Arabia

Someone has sent me this cartoon with the above caption:




But Hamid Bahrami the cartoonist doesn't have a caption for this one on his website.

And I love this one too:




which you can find here from the same cartoonist.

My principles

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others. Groucho Marx

Abyane and Natanz (ابیانه و نطنز)

On our way to Kerman we stayed overnight in Abyane village, which was cold but extremely beautiful. I'm in love with the calmness and redness of the village.





and here are some shots along the road from Abyaneh to Natanz:

Kerman and Mahan (کرمان و ماهان)

The snaps are from my trip to Shazdeh Garden (The Prince's Garden) ( باغ شازده یا باغ شاهزاده) in Mahan or as Kermanis call it Mahoon





You can also see one of our ancestors in the museum of paleontology or paleontological museum in Kerman :P :




I had no idea that there is another city called Kerman in the US: Kerman, California

Houshang Moradi Kermani

Once Houshang Moradi Kermani said in an interview that one of the prayers people used to say for others in Kerman had been: "Noonet garm bashe va aabet sard" which means "Wish you warm bread and cold water, always". Kerman is a city at the border of Kavir-e Lut (Lut desert). I think now cold water makes sense.

While he is famous for his The Tales of Madjid (Ghesseh-ha-ye Madjid) in Iran, the big clay jar is one of his books that is translated into several languages, including English, as I found: The big clay jar. I am not sure if The Tales of Madjid is translated but I'm adding a video from youtube, in which you can watch the introduction to one of the episodes of a series produced based on this book. In the video you can see Madjid's grandma cooking a traditional dish (even I don't know the dish). The film was produced in Esphahan in a very old house with the traditional architecture. (I guess I'll write a description on all these later)

Ghesehaye Majid (قصه های مجید) Intro - Malakhe Daryaei

300 movie

Do you think Hollywood has the right to produce a movie like 300, which shows Persians as monsters? I think there is no point in asking something like that, because they can make it, so they make it. We can just criticize and complain to UNESCO and write in our own domestic blogs about it. What about producing the same movie about ancient America, well there is nothing like that but still, and selling it all over the world? Or making another movie about 300? Or making a movie about what we believe is the real truth about the Persian empire? We can't do that right?

Thanks to our international film directors, even my image of Iran consists of some small green villages and some cities with tight dusty allies in which small, cute, kind but poor kids are always running to find something.

Hoda Hadadi, a book illustrator, writer and poet from Iran

Courtesy of Otaghe 6:

from Interview with Hoda Hadadi on Artenews

Afghan Girl

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Afghan Girl

You know you are living in 2006 when

I received this email few years back from a friend:

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

2. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers for your family of 3.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5 Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don't have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.

8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years in your life, is now cause for panic and you turn around to go get it.

10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )

12. You're reading this and nodding and laughing.

13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message.

14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

15. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn't a #9 on this list.

AND NOW U R LAUGHING at yourself.