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

no comment:

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.